Common questions, tips, and help with troubleshooting Heatmaps:
- Why aren't there Recordings in my account?
- Why aren't new Recordings being added to my account?
- Why isn't Hotjar recording every visitor?
- Why do the pages look broken/no CSS loading?
- Why do some parts of the page appear blank or without content?
- Why are Recordings being split?
- Why are the fonts/icon-fonts appearing as boxes or not loading at all?
- Why aren't adverts or my chat widget appearing in Recordings?
- Why can't I see all of my Recordings?
- Why do I get a popup telling me to upgrade when I try to start Recording?
- Why can't I start another Recording Snapshot?
- Will my Recordings be deleted if I start a new snapshot?
- I thought I had unlimited Recordings on Plus/Business?
- I thought I had 2000 Recordings on Basic?
Why aren't there Recordings in my account?
If you've started Recording but cannot see any new Recordings being added after a few hours, this may mean that the Hotjar Tracking Code isn't properly installed. You will need to confirm that all pages on your site have the Hotjar Tracking Code installed properly.
Why aren't new Recordings being added to my account?
When a snapshot is complete, to continue recording, enable Recordings again. A completed snapshot looks like this on your dashboard:
Once you click on the green button, you will be prompted to select the Snapshot size and start Recording sessions.
When a snapshot is currently in progress, you will see this on your Recordings dashboard:
It is also a good idea to confirm that all pages on your site have the Hotjar Tracking Code installed properly. The Tracking Code may have been removed in between Recording snapshots by accident or during a layout re-design.
Why isn't Hotjar Recording every visitor?
You might experience instances where other tools such as Google Analytics report more visits than Hotjar has Recordings. The various reasons this could be happening can be found in Does Hotjar Record ALL my visitors?
Why do the pages look broken/no CSS loading?
Hotjar servers need access to the assets on your site to generate Recordings successfully. When the CSS looks broken, this typically means our servers have difficulty fetching some of the CSS files from your server.
There are a number of things which could cause this. Here are the known reasons why sites may block Hotjar from accessing CSS:
- Blocking access based on geolocation, or your site only allows certain IPs to access assets
- Blocking based on domain/referrer
- Blocking based on User-Agent
- Blocking based on lack of cookie/sessionStorage
User-Agent, referrer, and IP blocking based issues can be addressed by:
- Whitelisting the IP addresses listed in Hotjar IPs.
- Whitelisting the domain/referrer http://local.hotjar.com
- Whitelisting the User Agents from How do Hotjar Heatmaps Work?
Why do some parts page appear blank or without content?
There are a few limitations on the type of content Hotjar supports for Recordings. If you've noticed that your Recording appears blank or seems to have some missing content, here are a few possibilities:
- Your page has a canvas element
- Your page uses Adobe Flash to render the content
- Your page has JavaScript running within an iframe
- Your page uses the Shadow DOM
Why are Recordings being split?
On some occasions, you may notice that Recordings are either split into separate Recordings or stop abruptly. This could happen for any of the following reasons:
- Hotjar keeps tracking a session even if your visitor is idle for a few minutes. If a visitor is idle for over 30 minutes, Hotjar will automatically end that session. If that visitor later returns, they will start a new Recording session. If you see Recordings being split, check the time they were added, it could be the visitor was idle for over 30 minutes or left your site and returned to it later on.
- Your visitors are moving to a new page in new browser tabs or windows. When this happens, Hotjar is currently unable to link the two sessions together.
- The Hotjar Tracking Code is not present on all pages so Hotjar is not able to record all sessions.
- Hotjar is unable to track visitors that are moving to pages across multiple top-level domains. An example of this is when a visitor moves from www.example.com to www.example.co.uk.
Navigating to third-party payment gateways will always stop a Recording
Since Hotjar cannot be placed on a third-party site, we will not be able to collect data on a third-party payment gateway. Recordings will stop once the visitor gets to this step in their journey.
Why are the fonts/icon-fonts appearing as boxes or not loading at all?
If web fonts on your site aren't appearing in visitor playbacks, this usually means that they are only allowed to load from your domain. Since sessions are played back on the insights.hotjar.com domain, you may see errors such as:
Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at http://www.domain.com/fonts/your-font.woff. This can be fixed by moving the resource to the same domain or enabling CORS.
To fix this, you will need to enable CORS (cross-origin resource sharing).
Enable CORS on Apache
If you have access to the .htaccess file or the httpd.conf configuration file, you can add the following code to allow your font files to be loaded externally:
<FilesMatch "\.(ttf|ttc|otf|eot|woff|font.css|css)$">
Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"
</FilesMatch>Enable CORS on nginx
If you have access to the httpd.conf configuration file, you can add the following code to allow your font files to be loaded externally:
if ($filename ~* ^.*?\.(eot)|(ttf)|(woff)$){
add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin *;
}For more information on how to enable CORS, you can check out enable-cors.org.
CORs may affect Heatmaps
If you are seeing this error within your Recordings, there is a chance the same error occurs within your Heatmaps.
Why aren't adverts or my chat widget appearing in Recordings?
When you are viewing Recordings of your site through the Hotjar Interface, ads such as those of Google Adsense do not load because it appears that they are being loaded through 'insights.hotjar.com', rather than your site/the site which they were intended for. This is something set in the security policy dictated by the third-party originating the ad.
Unfortunately, this is not something we can fix since it depends on how the ads render on the page. Such ads typically load within an iframe. iframes act as totally separate documents and when we try to load their content, we are forbidden from doing so from the originating server.
Why can't I see all of my Recordings?
There may be a date filter applied. If you see a 0 followed by a number, such as 0/999, this means you have 999 Recordings total, and none are showing on the list. Change the date range filter to Last 90 day or Custom date range in order to see more of your Recordings.
Why do I get a popup telling me to upgrade when I try to start Recording?
This means you are on the Basic plan and have more than 300 Recordings in your dashboard. If you see a 0 followed by a number, such as 0/300, this means you have 300 Recordings total and none are showing on the list. Change the date range filter to Last 90 day or Custom date range in order to see more of your Recordings.
To start Recording again, delete your older Recordings until you have less than 200 in your dashboard. Once you have room, you will no longer see an error when clicking "Record Visitors".
See also: How to Delete Recordings, Recording Filters
Why can't I start another Recording Snapshot?
This means you are on the Basic plan and have more than 300 Recordings in your dashboard. If you see a 0 followed by a number, such as 0/300, this means you have 300 Recordings total and none are showing on the list. Change the date range filter to Last 90 day or Custom date range in order to see more of your Recordings.
To start Recording again, delete your older Recordings until you have less than 200 in your dashboard. Once you have room, you will no longer see an error when clicking "Record Visitors".
See also: How to Delete Recordings, Recording Filters
Will my Recordings be deleted if I start a new snapshot?
No, Recordings are only deleted for two reasons:
- A user on the account the deleted them.
- The Recording reached their expiration date based on our Data Retention Policy.
I thought I had unlimited Recordings on Plus/Business?
On the Plus and Business plans, you can store unlimited Recordings in your dashboard. Recordings are taken in snapshots and the snapshot size depends on the plan.
Once your snapshot has finished, you will need to start another snapshot.
See also: Snapshots Explained
I thought I had 2000 Recordings on Basic?
Basic is recommended for sites with 2000 pageviews per day or less. You can have up to 300 Recordings, taken in snapshots of 100 Recordings each.
See also: Snapshots Explained, Hotjar Plans