To help you understand how visitors are interacting with your website, Hotjar records visitor sessions. When you are actively Recording visitors, the Hotjar script initiates a websocket connection which sends the following information to the Hotjar servers:
- HTML changes that happen while your visitor uses your pages
- Mouse movements
- Mouse clicks
- Scroll movements
- Keystrokes only for whitelisted input fields
- Browser viewport size changes
Each event tracked is saved in our cloud database using a time stamp which is later used to replay back the events in sequential order. The Hotjar Tracking Code will track your visitor as they visit different pages using a first-party cookie, enabling you to playback the entire session in a single Recording.
Hotjar will suppress keystroke data except for input fields which have been whitelisted. You can also suppress data within specific text fields or all on-page email addresses/numbers which might contain sensitive information about your users. When suppressing data, the Hotjar script does not record or send the data to our servers and asterisks "***" or 1s "111" are sent instead of the actual text.