How to Use Hotjar to Understand Your Website Visitors

Hotjar is one of the most popular tools for understanding visitor behaviour on websites. It combines heat maps, session recordings, and user surveys in a single platform, giving you both aggregated patterns and individual user journeys. For businesses trying to improve their website’s performance, Hotjar is often the fastest way to find out what is actually happening rather than what you assume is happening.

Setting up Hotjar is straightforward, and the insights it surfaces can inform smarter design decisions, better copy, and more effective conversion funnels. This guide walks through how to get started, what to look for, and how to translate what you see into practical improvements.

Installing Hotjar and Setting Up Your First Features

Create a Hotjar account at hotjar.com and add your website. Hotjar will give you a small JavaScript tracking code to add to every page of your site. If you use WordPress, there are plugins that do this automatically. For other platforms, add the code to your site's global header section. Once installed, Hotjar will begin collecting data immediately.

In the Hotjar dashboard, navigate to Heatmaps and create a heat map for your homepage. You can choose to collect click, move, and scroll data. Set it to run indefinitely and come back once you have at least a few hundred sessions. Simultaneously, enable Session Recordings to start capturing individual user journeys. Hotjar stores these recordings so you can filter and watch them later.

Watching Session Recordings Effectively

Session recordings can feel like you are watching someone browse your site in real time. They show every mouse movement, scroll, click, and form interaction. The most efficient way to use them is not to watch every recording from start to finish — instead, filter for sessions where a key goal was not completed. Watch people who visited your pricing page but did not enquire, or who started filling in your contact form but abandoned it.

Look for rage clicks (rapid repeated clicking on the same element, which Hotjar flags automatically) — these indicate frustration, usually because something looks clickable but is not. Look for people scrolling past your call to action without engaging. Look for moments where someone pauses on a piece of content for a long time, suggesting it is either very interesting or very confusing. Each of these moments is a clue worth investigating.

Using Surveys to Collect Direct Feedback

Hotjar includes on-page surveys and feedback widgets that let you ask visitors a direct question while they are on your site. A simple question placed on your pricing page — "What is stopping you from getting in touch today?" — can surface objections you had no idea existed. Short, targeted surveys consistently produce more useful insight than longer feedback forms sent after the fact.

Exit-intent surveys appear when a visitor is about to leave the page. They are particularly effective on checkout pages and lead capture pages. Asking "What almost stopped you from completing this?" immediately after a conversion (while the experience is fresh) can be equally valuable. Hotjar’s Xpose-level detail on visitor behaviour, combined with direct survey responses, gives website owners in Norwich and across the UK a powerful picture of what their visitors truly need. Combining this data with your Google Analytics figures creates a complete view of both what visitors are doing and why.