What Is Hotjar and How Small Business Websites Use It

Hotjar is a behaviour analytics tool that shows how visitors use your website through heatmaps, session recordings and on-page surveys, and it is now part of the Contentsquare platform. This ProfileTree guide explains what Hotjar shows, how to set it up on a UK website with cookie consent, and how to stop it slowing your pages.

What Hotjar shows you about your website visitors

Hotjar records what visitors do on a page, so you can see the behaviour behind your traffic figures. Google Analytics can tell you that visitors leave your services page quickly. Hotjar lets you see where on that page they stopped reading, what they tried to click and whether they gave up on a form.

Contentsquare bought Hotjar in 2021 and moved its tools into the Contentsquare platform in 2024, according to Contentsquare’s own account of the change. New users now sign up for Contentsquare, whose free plan carries the Hotjar heatmaps, session replays, surveys and feedback widgets. People still search for the tool by its old name, so this guide uses it throughout.

For a business owner, the value lies in seeing problems that traffic numbers alone cannot explain. If your site gets steady visits and few enquiries, behaviour data can help you find the page or the form that needs attention. Acting on it usually means website development work, because the fixes are changes to layout, forms and page speed.

Heatmaps

A heatmap is a picture of a page with colour laid over it to show where visitors clicked, how far down they scrolled or where they moved the cursor. A click map shows you when people click an image or a heading that is not a link, which tells you they expected it to take them somewhere. A scroll map shows what share of visitors reached each part of the page, so you can see whether your call to action (the button or link you want people to use) sits above or below the point where most of them stop.

A heatmap built from a handful of visits tells you very little, so start with the pages that get the most traffic. Our guide to reading Hotjar heatmaps in detail covers the three map types and what each one tells you.

Session recordings

A session recording is a replay of one visitor’s time on your site, showing their scrolling, clicks and pauses as a video. A practical way to begin is to watch ten recordings of people who reached your contact page and left without sending the form, and note anything they had in common. Look for rage clicks, which are rapid repeated clicks on something that is not responding, and for U-turns, where a visitor opens a page and goes straight back to the one before.

Recordings capture individual behaviour, and that matters for the law. As the consent section below explains, a tool that records individual visitors needs their consent before it runs.

Surveys and feedback widgets

Surveys let you ask visitors a short question at a set point, for example when they are about to leave a pricing page. Feedback widgets sit on the edge of the page and let visitors rate it or comment on it at any time. Both give you the visitor’s own explanation in their own words, which a heatmap or a recording cannot supply.

Hotjar and GA4 answer different questions

Google Analytics 4 (GA4, Google’s website analytics tool) counts visits, traffic sources and completed goals across your whole site. Hotjar looks closely at what happens on individual pages. Used together, GA4 tells you which pages underperform and Hotjar helps you see why.

A sensible way to start is to open GA4, find the pages with plenty of visits and few enquiries, and look at your Hotjar heatmaps and recordings for those pages first. If GA4 is new to you, our UK guide to GA4 explains the reports you will need.

Setting up Hotjar on WordPress and other platforms

Installing Hotjar means adding a short tracking script (a piece of JavaScript code) to every page of your site. The script comes from your account dashboard, and the method you use depends on how your site is built.

Installing through a plugin or Google Tag Manager

On WordPress, you can add the script through a plugin that manages header code, or through Google Tag Manager (Google’s tool for managing tracking scripts in one place). Google Tag Manager suits sites that already run other tracking, because its triggers let you decide when each script fires, including a trigger reserved for consent management tools.

Squarespace lets you add code to the header of every page on its Core, Plus and Advanced plans. For Wix, the steps are set out in our guide to adding the Hotjar tracking code to Wix.

Checking the script is recording

Once the script is live, visit your own site, accept analytics cookies in your banner and browse a few pages, then check your dashboard for incoming data. If nothing arrives, check two things first. Look for a caching plugin serving an old copy of the page without the script, and test whether your consent banner releases the script after a visitor accepts.

Hotjar cookie consent under UK GDPR and PECR

Hotjar needs a visitor’s consent before it loads on a UK website. The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR, the UK law that governs cookies and similar technologies) require consent for cookies that are not essential to the service. Hotjar sets first-party cookies (small files saved by your own site in the visitor’s browser), as its own privacy FAQs confirm.

What the law requires before the script loads

UK law now includes an exception that lets some analytics run without consent, where the purpose is purely statistical and visitors are told about it and given a simple way to object. The ICO’s guidance on the exceptions states that logs or recordings of individual visitors still need consent unless they are for security. Session recordings fall squarely into that category, so any business using Hotjar should block the script until the visitor accepts analytics cookies.

In practice, place Hotjar in the analytics category of your consent banner and set the banner, or Google Tag Manager, to fire the script only after acceptance. Test it by visiting the site in a private window, declining cookies and checking that no Hotjar request appears in your browser’s network panel.

Privacy settings to switch on

Hotjar states that it does not collect visitors’ IP addresses and that it suppresses sequences of numbers, such as card and phone numbers, by default. Other text, email addresses and numbers on the page are hidden only when you turn on text suppression in the site settings, so switch it on before you start recording. Check too that form fields are masked in recordings, because a name or address typed into an enquiry form is personal data under UK GDPR (the UK version of the EU data protection law).

Hotjar’s privacy FAQs refer to a Data Processing Agreement that forms part of its terms. Your privacy policy should also name the tool and explain what it records. If your forms collect personal data as well, our guide to GDPR-compliant web forms covers the wording and the consent steps.

Does Hotjar slow down your website?

Hotjar adds a third-party script to every page, and that script is extra work for the visitor’s browser. How much it matters depends on what else your pages already load, so measure it on your own site and do not assume.

Two figures are worth watching. Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is the Core Web Vital that measures how quickly a page responds when a visitor taps or clicks. Total Blocking Time is a lab measure, taken in speed tests, that Google describes as a reasonable lab proxy for INP but not a substitute for it. Run Google’s PageSpeed Insights on your key pages before you install Hotjar and again a week after, so you can see what changed.

If the scores drop, load the script later. In Google Tag Manager, fire the Hotjar tag with the Window Loaded trigger, which Google’s documentation says fires after the page has fully loaded. The trade-off is that Hotjar will not capture visitors who leave before that point. A consent banner that waits for acceptance also delays the script for every visitor, which works in your favour here.

Turning Hotjar data into fixes on your site

Behaviour data is only worth collecting if it changes something on the page. The table below pairs patterns you may see in Hotjar with a likely cause and a first fix to test.

Change one thing at a time and give it a few weeks before you judge it, because a small site needs time to gather enough visits for a fair comparison. Keep a short log of each change and its date, so you can match it against your GA4 enquiry figures later.

“Most of the damage I have seen done to business websites in Belfast happened during a rebuild that nobody measured. Behaviour data shows you what visitors do before you change anything, which is why ProfileTree measures every redesign before and after as part of the website development work we do for Northern Ireland businesses,” says Ciaran Connolly, founder of ProfileTree.

Matching recordings to search queries

Search Console shows you which queries bring people to a page from Google, and recordings of those visitors show you whether the opening of the page answers what they searched. When visitors from search leave within the first screen, compare the page’s first paragraph with their queries and rewrite it to answer them directly.

Recordings can also show visitors looking for information that sits on another page of your site. Where you see that pattern, an internal link placed where they were looking is a simple first fix to test.

Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity compared

Microsoft Clarity is a behaviour analytics tool from Microsoft with heatmaps and session recordings, which Microsoft describes as free with no traffic limits. The differences that matter to a business owner are the feedback tools and how long data is kept.

Clarity suits a business that wants recordings and heatmaps at no cost. Hotjar’s free plan suits a business that also wants to put questions to visitors on the page. Both tools record individual visitors, so the consent steps above apply to either.

ProfileTree is a Belfast web design and digital marketing agency, founded in 2011 and based at the McSweeney Centre. Our view is that a small business should pick one behaviour tool, set it up properly and review it monthly, which does more good than collecting data from several tools that nobody has time to read.

Frequently asked questions