Can I track iframes inside Recordings?

Hotjar cannot track iframes, due to potential security problems inherent to how iframes work. Additionally, by default, Hotjar's Recordings do not show parts of your site that are contained inside iframes. You will instead see the space where your iframe content would be as an element with a black background and a message. 

If you're unfamiliar with iframes, you can think of them as web pages inside web pages. They are often used to add elements like chatbots, videos, or forms to your pages by third-party services. You can read more about them in the Mozilla Developer Network documentation.

Hotjar offers the ability to display self-hosted iframes within Recordings without capturing movement and click data. This means the following content types cannot be captured within Hotjar Recordings:

❌Chatbots

❌Third-party video players (such as YouTube or Vimeo)

❌Third-party forms (for example, Typeform forms)

❌Web-apps that are loaded via iframes

❌Most third-party payment systems

❌Most third-party content

Enabling self-hosted iframes to display inside your Recordings is a two-step process:

• Adding an HTML attribute to the iframe
• Allowing iframes domain in your Hotjar Site Settings

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What limitations still exist after allowing an iframe?

Before allowing an iframe, you should consider some of the limitations that still exist even after allowing the iframe.

We can track:

✔️ a static page delivered through an iframe can be displayed inside a Recording.

✔️ mouse over behavior is tracked, relative to the parent page.

We cannot track:

❌ clicks on elements inside an iframe.

❌ scroll events inside an iframe.

❌ typing input inside an iframe.

❌ DOM mutation events.

❌ CSS animations dependent on user input (such as hovering over a button).

Additionally:

❌ JavaScript will not be executed.

These limitations mean that many third-party iframes, such as video players, chatbots, forms, and so on, may not display properly, even once allowed, because they rely on JavaScript to properly display.

If you'd like to record interactions happening inside of an iframe you can put the Hotjar Tracking Code in the head element of the iframe source page, but you must also remove the Tracking Code on the parent page. Having the Hotjar Tracking Code on both the source page and the page containing the iframe can cause Recordings of the page to fail and data collection to be skewed.

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Adding an HTML attribute to the iframe

If your iframe is not a third-party iframe and is hosted on your site, you can add an HTML attribute to make viewing the content within your Recordings possible. Movement and input data will still not be captured.

Add data-hj-allow-iframe as an HTML attribute to the iframe.

You can do this by adding an HTML attribute, data-hj-allow-iframe, to the iframe you wish to display.

<iframe src="/page.html" data-hj-allow-iframe=""></iframe> 

This can be written as ="", true or just data-hj-allow-iframe. Either way, the value will show as "true" on the backend. 

Before starting on this step, take a look at What limitations still exist after allowing an iframe?

Go to site settings by clicking Settings > Sites & Organizations

Click the cog icon next to the site you want to allow.

You will see a field where you can insert the top-level domain name you wish to allow, under the heading Allowed Iframe Domains For Recordings.

Add the domain name and save changes.

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