Designers and marketers are aware of how crucial data is to any digital strategy, but they are also aware of how laborious and time-consuming it can be to evaluate.
To analyze user behavior, they may utilize typical performance metrics like page visits, traffic source, and bounce rates, but doing so requires effort and only offers quantitative context.
WordPress heatmap plugins can provide the context that is absent in this situation.
To better analyze what people view, click, and scroll to, a heatmap is a more sophisticated analytics tool. They assist you in highlighting the problematic areas of your website and focusing on the precise areas that function.
Today, we’ll go into more depth about what heatmaps are, what they can accomplish, and which WordPress plugins and programs to use to add the greatest heatmap functionality to your analytics toolkit.
Heatmap tools for WordPress
A heatmap displays how visitors engage with various website pages. A heatmap layers color on the page according to user interaction; hot colors like red and yellow denote higher levels of engagement, while cold colors like green and blue denote lower levels.
Your study gains yet another qualitative dimension thanks to heatmaps.
They specifically inform you which page parts and pieces are the most popular. With this knowledge, you may make minor adjustments to your website layouts and parts to enhance efficiency and usability while significantly lowering uncertainty.
We can differentiate several kinds of heatmaps:
– Click heatmap
– Scroll heatmap
– Segment heatmap
– Mouse tracking heatmap or replays
Click heatmap for WordPress sites
Use a click map to see which of your links or buttons are most frequently clicked on a website.
It can assist you in determining which of your visitors’ preferred subpages. Click heatmaps may be used to identify the CTAs, colors, and buttons that work the best.
Scroll heatmap
You may determine the most popular page regions by looking at a scroll map. Consider relocating a crucial part of the page if people are missing it.
Scroll heatmaps are primarily used to assess blog interfaces. It can assist you in determining which post on your website received the most traffic.
Segment heatmap
By employing segment heatmaps, you may discover more about the origins of your users and how each group uses your website.
This is essential for PPC efforts since you can discover which platform receives the most and least traffic.
As you can see, heatmaps provide a more in-depth understanding of user behavior than site-wide or even page-wide metrics.
Although tools like GA4 are obviously helpful, they tend to focus on more general concepts like page traffic, time spent on the page, and bounce rate.
There are various heatmap tools and plugins available if you operate a WordPress website.
Plugins that can be helpful
Several useful free or paid plugins provide an easy and flexible connection with heatmap tools and your website.
Do not forget that the usage of each plugin depends on your personal budget and your website background. It can be possible that your type of WordPress will not support every plugin in this list.
Let’s check these:
– Crazy Egg
– Hotjar
– Capturly
– Yoast
– Inspectlet
– Mouseflow
Crazy Egg heatmap for WordPress
Crazy Egg, the most widely used heatmap tool on our list with over 350,000 users, is praised for its affordability and wealth of features for comprehending audience behavior.
Crazy Egg provides a variety of user engagement visualizations, including click maps, scroll maps, visitor recordings, and more.
Additionally, you’ll receive tools that may be used to study how users move through your website as well as information on click-based statistics, such as how many clicks are coming from social media traffic vs organic search.
When combined, the capabilities of Crazy Egg provide a comprehensive account of how consumers interact with your material. Installing Crazy Egg’s WordPress plugin will automatically embed the tracking script on all of your pages when you use it.
This is not a free tool. You can choose a Basic, Standard, Plus, or Enterprise plan depending on your website size and your goal.
Hotjar Heatmaps for WordPress
Heatmaps for browsing, clicking, moving the mouse, and downloading digital material are available from Hotjar, a complete visual analytics plugin.
Additionally, Hotjar offers visitor surveys to determine visitor happiness, form monitoring to learn how people interact with your forms, and visitor recordings.
The Hotjar plugin also offers user testing if you’re trying to do a more thorough investigation into user activities. Hotjar is a service that makes it easy to contact participants and compensate them for their participation in testing on your website.
Capturly heatmap
An online analytics service called Capturly aids companies in gathering information directly from people who visit their websites. It accomplishes this by examining and analyzing how users interact with the website.
Heatmaps, which Capturly offers users, display which website sections are generating more traffic and which ones aren’t.
Additionally, it provides data on the geographic origins of the users and their interactions with the website. Every consumer session on the website is captured by this technology.
Users can watch the sessions that have been recorded and gather the pertinent data they want.
It is important that Capturly does not have a WordPress plugin, but it is absolutely worth it to integrate it on your WordPress-based website. You just have to copy-paste a tracking code to your HTML or into Google Tag Manager and that’s it.
If you are a startup you can try it for free in a basic account.
Clicky heatmap plugin for WordPress
The developers of the well-known Yoast SEO plugin produced the free WordPress plugin known as Clicky by Yoast. This plugin links your WordPress website to the online analytics tool Clicky.
Clicky assists you in keeping tabs on on-site activity by gathering heatmap information for each page, tracking the duration of each user session, and using APIs to allow third-party software to track videos.
Goal tracking (with certain restrictions for certain user activity) and a sophisticated bounce rate calculation are two distinctive features of the Clicky plugin.
Inspectlet heatmap plugin for WordPress
Inspectlet, another excellent alternative for web analytics, is designed with medium-sized and big websites in mind. It offers heatmaps for mouse movement, scrolling, clicking, and even eye-tracking, which is useful for user testing.
Along with heat mapping, Inspectlet also has options for session recording, form analytics, and A/B testing.
Mouseflow heatmap for WordPress
Mouseflow is primarily a visitor activity playback system. To provide you the option to create a session replay, it captures all mouse movements, including clicks, scroll events, and even touches on mobile devices.
You may even filter session records by a particular tag and tag users to keep track of their recurrent sessions.
However, don’t forget about heatmaps; Mouseflow enables you to create a click, cursor movement, and scroll maps. Additionally, you may filter maps based on where users are located.
Why should you use it on your WordPress site?
Why are my users not converting? is just one important business concern and goal that heatmaps assist product managers and website owners in addressing. Heatmaps allow you to ascertain whether users are:
– Reaching crucial information or missing it
– Locating and using the primary links, buttons, opt-ins, and CTAs on a page
– Being sidetracked by inactive elements
– Having problems with several devices
Heat maps are a visual tool that may assist you in making data-driven decisions for A/B testing, website updates, and design.
They’re also helpful on a larger corporate level since heatmaps make it simple to explain what’s occurring to team members and stakeholders and gain their support when adjustments are needed.
How do WordPress heatmap plugins work?
Heatmap plugins function similarly to web analytics. After installing Google Analytics or a comparable analytical program, you can start monitoring visitor behavior and creating the various heatmaps we covered previously.
However, producing heatmap data can be time-consuming; for this reason, many heatmap systems employ data sampling. The program won’t record heatmap information for each and every user who visits your website due to data sampling.
Instead, it will merely pick a representative sample and extrapolate it to all of the visitors to your website. For instance, if your website receives a lot of traffic, the program could only examine one out of every 15-20 visits.
Additionally, there are two comprehensive strategies for WordPress heatmap plugins:
– Basic WordPress plugins: With basic WordPress plugins, all of your data is stored on the servers that host your website, and you can manage it all from your WordPress dashboard.
– With a SaaS solution, you’ll utilize a different interface to view your heatmaps and your data is stored on the provider’s servers.
SaaS stands for “software as a service.” Using a special integration plugin or a short piece of code, you may quickly integrate these technologies into WordPress.
In general, SaaS programs provide more sophisticated analysis options, such as segmentation, although the default WordPress plugins work just fine for simple heatmaps.
Conclusion
Heatmaps are an effective tool for helping you understand how visitors interact with your website.
Once you have this knowledge, you can utilize it to improve the usability and conversion rate of your WordPress site. Although it may raise the price of creating your WordPress site, the value of the data you get will make the investment more than worthwhile.
There are several additional excellent solutions, many of which offer dedicated WordPress integration plugins, assuming you’re prepared to use a SaaS product. Capturly is just an excellent place to start because they both provide practical features and unlimited free plans.
Flavius is a digital tech savy with passion for web design, digital marketing and all online stuff. In his free time, he likes to go to the gym, practice kickboxing and watching sports.
