Hotjar offers options to suppress all text-based on-page numbers and email addresses, input fields, and some text within Heatmaps, Recordings and Feedback widgets.
Text suppression converts text to a random number of asterisks (***) or 1s (111111).
All fields, text, and images are suppressed before sending the data back to our servers. There is no way to retrieve the content suppressed once a report has been created. Suppression is not retroactive, meaning changes will only apply to newly collected data once the settings are enabled/disabled.
Learn more about:
- Email & numeric text suppression
- All on-page text & content suppression
- Suppressing specific elements
- Suppressing a user's country from recorded data
- Why is text not being suppressed?
- Examples of Suppression
Only Admins and Account Owners have access to edit suppression settings
You can find what your access permissions allow in our Team Member Permissions Guide.
How to enable email and number text suppression
It is important to keep in mind that by default, Hotjar will suppress a sequence of numbers, like a credit card number or phone number, without turning on numeric text suppression.
Visit Sites & Organizations within your Hotjar Account.
Click the gear icon to access Site Settings for the site you would like to suppress on-page text.
You will need an Admin team member permission or higher.
Check the boxes for the type of suppression you'd like to activate.
Whitelisting takes priority over on-page text suppression
If a text field that is whitelisted contains a number or email address, the text will be shown on Recordings, Heatmap, and Incoming Feedback screenshots even if on-page text suppression is turned on.
You can learn more about whitelisting in our Whitelisting Input Fields article.
Make sure to click Update to save changes.
How to enable all on-page text and content suppression
All On-Page Text Suppression replaces all on-page text with asterisks in Heatmaps, Recordings, and Incoming Feedback. All On-Page Content Suppression blocks all page content (images and text) from appearing in Heatmaps, Recordings, and Incoming Feedback.
These options apply to any pages that have your Hotjar tracking code installed.
Visit Sites & Organizations within your Hotjar Account.
Click the gear icon to access Site Settings for the site you would like to suppress on-page text.
You will need an Admin team member permission or higher.
Check either Suppress all on-page text or Suppress all on-page content.
Data that Hotjar cannot suppress
We currently do not support suppression for historical data. Any data collected before starting the on-page suppression will not be suppressed.
How to suppress specific elements
You can suppress individual elements, input fields, and regular text by making a small modification to your site code by adding an attribute data-hj-suppress to the elements you wish to suppress.
<!-- The below will suppress any characters typed in the field-->
<input type="text" name="company" data-hj-suppress />
<!-- The below will suppress any characters typed in the field-->
<textarea name="comments" data-hj-suppress></textarea>
<!-- The below will suppress any characters displayed in the paragraph-->
<p data-hj-suppress>Suppress me</p>
<!-- The below will suppress any characters displayed in any of the child elements inside the span element-->
<span data-hj-suppress>
<p>Suppress this</p>
<p>and this</p>
</span>
We also replace suppressed images with the pattern below, matching the size of the original image.
You can suppress images, excluded any CSS background images, by adding an attribute data-hj-suppress to your site code on the image you wish to suppress.
<!-- The below will suppress the specific image element-->
<img data-hj-suppress src="hotjarlogo.png" height="250" width="600">
<!-- The below will suppress all images within the <div> element-->
<div data-hj-suppress>
<img src="image1.png" height="250" width="600">
<img src="image2.png" height="300" width="500">
</div>
Suppressing a user's country value from being collected
Suppressing a user's country from being collected prevents Hotjar from permanently storing any IP address information, even in a semi-anonymized form.
This means that Hotjar cannot identify the country the user visited your site from. When checked, the user's country will be rendered as a flag with a question mark inside it in the Recordings list and Feedback Responses.
Visit Sites & Organizations within your Hotjar Account.
Click the gear icon to access Site Settings for the site you would like to suppress on-page text.
You will need an Admin team member permission or higher.
Check the Suppress location information option.
Why is my text not being suppressed?
If the text you are trying to suppress is not located directly on the page or is located within a text field, you will need to set up suppression within an input field for both Heatmaps, Recordings and Incoming Feedback.
You can check out the section about How to Suppress Non-On-Page Text Elements above.
Examples of On-Page Text and Content Suppression
On-Page Number and Email
Suppression of All On-Page Text
Suppression of All On-Page Content
