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 timestamp which is later used to replay back the events in order. The Hotjar Tracking Code will track your visitor as they visit different pages using a first-party cookie, allowing 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.
You know how they work, now let's get them running!
Head to How to Start and Stop Recordings to learn how to get your Recordings collecting data for you site.