When it comes to web design projects, Katy Perry said it best: it’s never really over. Once your web design business launches a client’s site, you simply move on to the next round of design research. After all, you need a live site to see how users interact with it.
Take for instance your Wix Studio site’s data dashboard: you’ll see hard numbers, like visitors, time on page and bounce rate. But to go behind the numbers and understand visitors’ behaviors, you need to turn to website heatmaps. These provide valuable insights into what your visitors are doing, what they’re most interested in, and where they might be facing a problem. Because if visitors aren’t converting or engaging, will your clients think you designed a good website?
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What is a website heatmap?
A website heatmap is a data visualization tool, showing how visitors of your site interact with it. The heatmaps display areas of user interactivity via color: typically the popular areas will be warmer colors, like red and orange, and less engaged spots will be cooler colors, like blue and purple. The various colors convey differences in user interaction or attention.
Website heatmaps are useful in illustrating how people are using your site or product, and they can quickly highlight certain trends or areas for improvement.
What does a website heatmap show?
A website heatmap looks like your site design, with an overlay of data visualization. This helps you immediately see how users act in specific areas of the site. These activities include:
Button clicks
Page scrolls
Reading areas
Navigation behaviors
Cursor movements
But it’s the insights you get from observing these activities that deliver the full value of heatmaps for websites, such as:
Attention span threshold. How much content are visitors willing to read on the page before taking an action or leaving the page?
Flow salience. Are users following the flow you’ve designed, or do they take other actions that appear more obvious or natural?
Content relevance. Do visitors skip past sections of your pages, because the messaging is redundant or unclear?
Functional ease. Do users have a friction-free experience to navigate your pages and complete actions, like form submissions or checkout purchases?
These are only a few of the invaluable insights that website heatmaps will show you about the site’s design and content. Implementing heatmaps for your website immediately from launch should be an essential part of your pre-launch checklist.
Why should you use a website heatmap?
Findings from website heatmaps will help you iterate designs with more certainty and improve a few areas of your website’s performance, such as:
Reducing your bounce rate by identifying where visitors get stuck on their journeys, so you can improve the design, content or site structure to minimize site exits.
Improving conversions by removing points of friction and optimizing CTA placements, giving users a smoother entry into your sales funnel.
Improving messaging by reviewing where on your site—and with which messages—visitors engage the most, and if they scroll down to read all your content.
Improving design and flow with insights on how visitors move within and across your site’s pages, or if something throws them off course.
Running A/B tests and consulting heatmaps to monitor the impact of design changes on two different groups of users.
Types of website heatmaps
Depending on your goals, you’ll use one or a combination of the following types of heatmaps:
Click maps show you where users are clicking and tapping on your page, and may help highlight where they struggle to use your site. For example: imagine you had a list of pricing plans. Your users want to sign up, so they’re clicking the plans but the plans aren’t clickable. When users repeatedly click and nothing happens, they leave the page frustrated. If you could spot this pattern, then you could make the plans clickable or add buttons for users to easily select a plan.
Scroll maps help you understand how far down your users are navigating your webpages. For example, a scroll map may be useful for long web pages such as landing pages in understanding why sign-ups are low when the contact form is at the bottom of the page. The scroll map may show us that our visitors are spending more time in the section above the fold compared to anywhere else on the page.
Mouse maps or hover maps track cursor movements to show what visitors are doing on the site, and which sections they’re interested in. Since the mouse often mimics a visitor’s eye movements, these maps show how site information is consumed. You may find that you need to reorder elements within a site’s section to match the user’s flow. In addition, most horizontal menus use hover effects to reveal a site’s contents, so a hover map will show how visitors use your site’s rich navigation.
Eye tracking maps visualize where your visitors are looking on your webpage, like mouse and hover maps, but with more precision thanks to specialized devices or programs. If you want to test your site’s attractiveness or stickiness, eye tracking shows you what grabs and holds visitors’ attention. You might see that visitors are completely distracted by other less important elements on your site, and adjust accordingly.
How do you use a website heatmap?
Thanks to numerous ready-to-go tools for website heatmaps—more on that below—it’s easy to make them a part of your web design process. But in order to start using them, your chosen tool needs at least a few weeks to collect visitor data to generate meaningful heatmaps for your website. Then, there are two different ways you can use them.
Use website heatmaps to create a plan of action
In this instance, website heatmaps lead the process and become the first port of call. By reviewing heatmaps on a daily or weekly basis, you’ll notice trends or sudden changes that might prompt action. For example, a scroll map might show an ongoing trend of users not reaching important content further down the page, so you’ll want to rearrange your site sections. Alternatively a click map might show a sudden increase of clicks on an unclickable element, indicating that something in your site design is confusing users.
Use website heatmaps to validate data findings
Here, data analysis leads the process and you consult website heatmaps to understand the numbers. For example, the reports from your Wix Studio eCommerce store might show that visitors add items to their carts but then don’t complete the checkout. Refer to your click or mouse heatmaps to see if users are struggling to find the cart icon or checkout buttons, or if part of the checkout process fails and causes customers to abandon the cart.
Website heatmapping tools
Now that you have an idea of why and how to use heatmaps for your websites, it’s time to try them out on your web designs. Luckily, there are a number of great website heatmapping tools available:
CrazyEgg offers a selection of heatmaps for you to choose from, with integrations into many website builder tools and the option for A/B split testing.
Hotjar is one of the most popular user research tools. They have a great list of integrations and offer many different types of heatmaps (including scroll maps, click maps and hover maps). On top of that, they have some nice supporting functionality like user feedback and survey widgets you can overlay on your website in a few clicks.
Full Story is a behavioral data platform offering website heatmaps as well as a wide range of insightful tools like session recordings. Their heatmaps are clean and friendly to read, so it’s easy to present to clients (and impress them with your findings).
The sooner you integrate your preferred tool, the sooner insights will begin to appear. Adding these tools to your practice adds a recurring cost to your overhead, so consider how to price your web design services with website heatmapping tools in mind. Even though heatmapping tools are an additional cost, they provide an additional opportunity. By monitoring the performance of your client’s site—and offering to optimize the site quarterly—you open the door to recurring revenue for your agency.
Heatmapping your design files
Just as heatmapping can do wonders for live websites, you can get heatmaps on your design mockups too. Tools like UsabilityHub and Maze allow you to export your artboards or prototypes and get feedback on them before you start building your design on Wix Studio or writing code.
This can remove the guesswork from your design process by finding the best performing iterations to progress with. And use your design heatmapping findings in your client convos to help sell your creative vision and assure your clients they’ve got an effective site on their hands.
Next up: Effective site mapping in 7 steps
