Website Heatmaps: What They Show and How to Use Them

A website heatmap is a visual overlay that shows where visitors click, move their mouse, or scroll on a page. Hot spots — usually shown in red and orange — indicate areas of high activity. Cold spots — blues and greens — show areas that are ignored or not reached. The result is an immediate, visual way to understand whether your pages are working as intended.

Heatmaps are one of the most accessible and impactful tools in conversion rate optimisation. Unlike analytics data, which tells you what happened in aggregate numbers, heatmaps show you where and why — giving you a starting point for specific improvements.

Types of heatmap and what each shows

Click maps show where users click — including clicks on elements that are not links, which reveals where people expect to be able to interact. Scroll maps show how far down a page visitors scroll, typically showing that far fewer people reach the bottom than the top. Move maps show where users hover their mouse — on desktop, this correlates reasonably well with where they are reading.

Session recordings, often bundled with heatmap tools, show individual user journeys — you can watch recordings of real visits to your site, seeing exactly what each user clicked, scrolled and read. A morning watching ten session recordings on a low-converting page will reveal problems that weeks of analytics data would not.

The main heatmap tools

Hotjar is the most widely used heatmap and session recording tool for small and medium businesses, with a free plan covering up to 35 daily sessions and three heatmaps. Microsoft Clarity is completely free with no session or heatmap limits, and it includes session recordings, smart events and a dashboard that shows rage clicks (frustrated clicking) and dead clicks (clicking non-interactive elements).

Paid alternatives include Lucky Orange (from around $18 per month) and FullStory (enterprise pricing). For most small business websites, starting with Microsoft Clarity gives you immediate access to heatmap and recording data at no cost. If you need more advanced segmentation or funnel analysis, upgrading to a paid tool is straightforward.

What to look for and what to do about it

Common findings from heatmap analysis include: visitors not scrolling far enough to see your main call to action (move the CTA higher); clicks on elements that are not links — images, headings, decorative icons — indicating the visitor expected them to be interactive; low engagement on sections you expected to be important, suggesting the content is not resonating; and high engagement on a specific sentence or fact that you can emphasise further.

Do not redesign your entire page based on one week of heatmap data. Form a specific hypothesis — "I think the CTA is being missed because it is below the fold" — then make the change and measure whether conversion improves. Heatmaps are diagnostic tools, not decision-making oracles. The insight they provide should feed into a cycle of hypothesis, change and measurement.