The Site settings page can only be accessed by team members with 'Admin' permissions. It allows you to manage your site's information and session capture settings. Below are the five sections available within Site settings:
- Session capture: allows you to enable or disable Session capture which is used to collect data for Recordings and Heatmaps.
- Site information: basic information about your site.
- Session targeting & tracking: change Session capture behavior for Recordings and Heatmaps.
- Data suppression: control what data should not be sent and stored to protect user privacy.
- IP blocking: manage IP addresses that you don't want Hotjar to track. This will only affect Recordings and Heatmaps. It will not prevent users from seeing Survey or Feedback tools.
Finding Site settings
Site settings are accessed from your Site list.
Click on Settings, then Sites & Organizations
Select the Site whose settings you want to edit.
Click on the cog icon next to the Site settings you need to edit.
Session Capture
Session Capture applies to both Recordings and Heatmaps.
Disabling session capture will stop all new data collection for both Recordings and Heatmaps.
The Session Capture toggle allows you to toggle data capture on or off. When session capture is disabled, it will immediately stop all data collection for Recordings and Heatmaps. Feedback and Surveys will continue gathering user responses. However, User Attributes will not be sent with Survey responses as session capture needs to be enabled for this to occur.
Site Information
The Site Information section allows you to change basic information about your Hotjar Site.
- Site Name: this determines your site's name. We recommend using the name of your organization or company.
- Site URL: this determines the site's URL inside Hotjar. The URL you set in this field does not determine which pages Hotjar will track. Only pages where the Hotjar tracking code is installed can be tracked, regardless of the URL shown here.
- Industry / Sector: Hotjar may send you resources, based on this selection, to help you get the most out of your Hotjar experience.
- Legal Name: Hotjar feedback tools can be configured to display your site's legal name. If used, the name will be taken from this field.
- Site Privacy Policy URL: your privacy policy can be linked from feedback tools when connecting survey and feedback responses to Recordings.
Session Targeting & Tracking
Page-specific and Event-triggered session tracking is only available on paid Observe plans.
Page-specific and Event-triggered session tracking can be enabled on sites using an Observe Plus plan or higher. You can view our available plans on our Pricing page
You have different options for configuring how Hotjar captures user sessions:
- Capture sessions shorter than 30 seconds: Allow Hotjar to capture Recordings shorter than 30 seconds. Otherwise, those sessions will be ignored.
- Start capturing sessions on specific pages or when a custom event fires: Specify which pages or events should cause Hotjar to begin tracking the user's session. We have articles that cover session targeting and Events in more detail.
- Tracking URL changes: Determine which way Hotjar should evaluate URLs on your site. This is primarily used with single-page applications. You can learn more about this in our Hotjar on Single Page Apps article.
- Allowed iframe domains: Allow self-hosted iframes to appear inside the Recording player or in a Heatmap. Note that there are significant limitations around the use of iframes with Hotjar. Learn more about iframes in our Can I Track iframes Inside Heatmaps and Recordings article.
Data Suppression
Data suppression prevents Hotjar from gathering personally-identifying information (PII) from your users. Since every site potentially has different types of PII content, Hotjar offers a range of settings. Learn more about data suppression in Hotjar.
IP Blocking
If you do not wish to collect session data from your own Team Members, it's possible to block their sessions by IP address.
IP blocking will only work on a static IP address, or IP addresses from a fixed range. If a user is on a dynamic IP address, IP blocking may not help. Instead, check out How to Stop Hotjar From Collecting your Data.
Click on Block a New IP to add a new IP address to the list, or click Block your current IP to automatically add the IP address you're currently connected to. The first column in each row should be a description for the IP address, such as the individuals name or office location. The second column is used to enter an IP address or regular expression for ranges of IP addresses.
Only use IP blocking for static IP addresses using IPv4 format
Dynamic IP addresses change periodically, so Hotjar won't be able to block them consistently if used. Instead only block static IP addresses that do not change over time. Also, the IP block feature only supports IPv4 format (x.x.x.x) or Regular Expressions. Hotjar does not accept IPv6 format (y:y:y:y:y:y:y:y).
