You can have the most beautifully designed Showit website in your niche and still not know why visitors are leaving without booking. Traffic analytics tell you how many people visit your site. Hotjar tells you what they actually do when they get there.
Hotjar is a behavior analytics tool that records how real visitors interact with your website. It shows where they click, how far they scroll, where they hover, and where they abandon a page. For Showit users who have invested time and care into their website design, Hotjar answers the question that standard analytics cannot: is the design actually working?
This guide covers how to install Hotjar on your Showit website, set up your first heatmaps and session recordings, and use the data to make informed decisions about your pages.
What Is Hotjar and Why Should Showit Users Care?
Hotjar is a product experience insights platform that provides heatmaps, session recordings, user surveys, and funnel analysis. According to Hotjar’s product overview, the tool is used by over one million websites to understand how users navigate and interact with their pages.
For Showit users, Hotjar is particularly valuable because Showit’s design freedom means your pages can be structured in countless ways. A page layout that looks logical to you as the designer may create confusion for first-time visitors. Hotjar shows you exactly where that confusion happens, which elements draw attention, and which important sections are being ignored.
Common insights Hotjar surfaces for Showit websites include:
Visitors not scrolling far enough to see your call-to-action button, a navigation menu item that everyone hovers over but rarely clicks, a contact form that visitors start filling out but abandon partway through, and a portfolio section that receives significantly more engagement than other content types.
Each of these insights gives you a specific, actionable direction for improving your Showit page design without guesswork.
Step 1: Create a Hotjar Account
Go to hotjar.com and create a free account. Hotjar’s free plan includes a generous amount of session recordings and heatmap data for most small to medium websites. Paid plans provide higher data volumes and advanced features like conversion funnels and user interview recording.
For most Showit users getting started with behavior analytics, the free plan is sufficient to gather meaningful initial insights.
After creating your account, Hotjar will prompt you to add your website. Enter your Showit website’s URL and give the site a name. Hotjar will then generate your unique tracking code.
Step 2: Get Your Hotjar Tracking Code
After adding your website in Hotjar, the platform displays your site-specific JavaScript tracking code. This code includes your unique Hotjar Site ID, which identifies your website in Hotjar’s systems.
Copy the entire tracking code snippet. Hotjar’s code is typically a short self-contained JavaScript function that includes your Site ID. You will paste this into your Showit website’s header in the next step.
Step 3: Add Hotjar to Your Showit Website
Showit’s Site Settings include a Custom Code section where site-wide scripts are added. This is where Hotjar’s tracking code belongs.
Open Showit Site Settings
Log in to your Showit account and open your website in the editor. Navigate to Site Settings. Inside Site Settings, find the section for Custom Code, Header Code, or a similarly labeled area where global scripts are added.
Showit processes code added here and includes it in the header of every published page on your site. This ensures Hotjar tracks visitor behavior across your entire website, not just specific pages.
Paste the Hotjar Code
Paste your Hotjar tracking code into the header code field. Make sure the complete snippet is included without any missing characters. Save the settings.
Publish Your Showit Site
After saving, publish your Showit website. Hotjar only begins tracking after the site is published, so this step is essential. Changes made in Showit’s editor but not published will not reflect in Hotjar data.
Step 4: Verify Hotjar Is Tracking Your Showit Site
Before relying on Hotjar data for design decisions, verify the installation is working correctly.
Use Hotjar’s Built-In Verification
Inside your Hotjar dashboard, open the site you created and look for a verification or setup status indicator. Hotjar will show whether it has received data from your website. After visiting your live published Showit site, the status should update to verified within a few minutes.
Check the Incoming Data
Navigate to Heatmaps or Recordings in your Hotjar dashboard. After visiting a few pages on your Showit site, you should see new session recordings and heatmap data beginning to accumulate.
If no data appears after 24 hours and multiple visits, re-check the code placement in Showit’s Site Settings and confirm the site was published after the code was added.
Step 5: Set Up Heatmaps on Your Key Showit Pages
Heatmaps are one of Hotjar’s most powerful features for Showit users. They aggregate data from all visitors to a page and visualize it as a color overlay that shows where the most and least engagement occurs.
Types of Heatmaps
Hotjar offers three types of heatmaps. Click maps show where visitors are clicking or tapping on your page, which reveals whether your calls to action are receiving attention and whether visitors are clicking on non-clickable elements. Move maps show where visitors move their mouse, which often correlates with what they are reading or considering. Scroll maps show how far down the page visitors scroll before leaving, which tells you whether important content at the bottom of the page is actually being seen.
Create a Heatmap for Your Homepage
Your Showit homepage is the highest-priority page for heatmap analysis. Create a new heatmap for your homepage URL in Hotjar. The heatmap will begin accumulating click data immediately and will populate with meaningful patterns after roughly 100 visits.
Set Up Heatmaps for Key Pages
After your homepage, prioritize heatmaps for your services or pricing page, your contact page, and your main portfolio page. These are the pages where visitor behavior most directly affects your booking rate.
For guidance on what your key Showit pages should achieve strategically, the guide on the secret to designing a high-converting homepage provides design principles that Hotjar data can help you evaluate and refine.
Step 6: Enable Session Recordings
Session recordings capture individual visitor sessions as video-like playbacks. You can watch exactly how each visitor navigates your Showit site: where they scroll, what they click, how long they pause on specific sections, and where they exit.
Configure Session Recording Settings
In your Hotjar dashboard, navigate to Recordings and configure which pages or your entire site should be recorded. For most Showit websites, recording all pages provides the richest dataset. You can filter recordings by page, device type, or session duration once you are analyzing the data.
What to Look for in Recordings
When reviewing session recordings on your Showit site, focus on patterns rather than individual outliers. If most visitors scroll past your services section quickly, that section may need a redesign. If visitors repeatedly click an image expecting it to be a link, adding a link or button there could improve navigation.
Recordings also reveal mobile-specific issues that may not be visible in Showit’s editor preview. Visitors on mobile devices often interact very differently from desktop visitors, and recordings show those differences clearly.
Step 7: Add a Feedback Survey to Your Showit Site
Hotjar includes an on-site survey feature that lets you ask visitors a short question while they are browsing your Showit site. This qualitative data complements the behavioral data from heatmaps and recordings.
Simple Survey Setup
Create a short survey with one question, such as “What brought you to this page today?” or “Is there anything stopping you from reaching out?” These open-ended questions often reveal objections or information gaps that behavioral data alone cannot explain.
Position the survey to appear after a visitor has spent a meaningful amount of time on your site, such as after 30 seconds on your pricing page or after three page views. This targets engaged visitors rather than people who bounced immediately.
Use Survey Responses to Improve Your Showit Copy
The language visitors use in their survey responses is extremely valuable for improving your Showit page copy. If multiple visitors describe your services using specific words or phrases, incorporating those exact phrases into your page headlines and descriptions makes your copy feel more intuitive and relevant to the people reading it.
Interpreting Hotjar Data for Your Showit Website
Having data is only valuable if you know how to act on it. Here is how to translate the most common Hotjar findings into specific Showit improvements.
Low Scroll Depth on Your Homepage
If scroll maps show that most visitors leave your homepage before reaching your portfolio or call to action, try moving key content higher in the page layout. Showit’s canvas allows you to reorder sections without rebuilding the design, so testing a new layout order is relatively fast.
Clicks on Non-Linked Elements
If visitors are clicking on a headline, photo, or other non-linked element, they expect that element to be clickable. Add a link to that element or consider whether it could serve as a button leading to a relevant page or section.
Form Abandonment
If session recordings show visitors starting to fill out your contact form and then leaving, check whether the form has too many fields, confusing labels, or any error messages that are preventing submission. Simplifying your contact form is one of the highest-impact changes you can make to improve conversion rates.
For context on building effective contact forms and embeds for Showit, the guide on embedding contact forms in Showit covers the options and best practices.
Mobile Navigation Issues
If recordings of mobile sessions show visitors struggling to find the navigation menu or tapping the wrong buttons, your Showit mobile canvas may need adjustments. Review the mobile canvas specifically for the pages showing issues and test changes on a real device.
Hotjar Pricing for Showit Website Owners
Hotjar’s free plan provides up to 35 daily sessions recorded and basic heatmap functionality, which is typically sufficient for smaller Showit websites. As your traffic grows, paid plans starting at a modest monthly cost remove session limits and provide advanced features.
For most creative businesses using Showit as a primary marketing website, the free plan covers enough volume to gather meaningful insights for initial optimization decisions. Check Hotjar’s current pricing page for the most up-to-date plan details.
Final Thoughts
Hotjar gives you the ability to see your Showit website through your visitors’ eyes, and that perspective is invaluable for continuous improvement. Every heatmap and session recording reveals something that would otherwise require expensive user testing to uncover.
Install Hotjar, let it collect data for a few weeks, and then set aside time to review what you find. Even one significant insight per quarter, acted on promptly, can meaningfully improve your site’s conversion rate over time.
For professional help optimizing your Showit website design and performance based on behavioral data and best practices, GetPerfectWebsite’s Showit optimization service combines technical expertise with strategic design thinking.
FAQ
Is Hotjar free to use on a Showit website?
Yes. Hotjar’s free plan includes session recordings and heatmaps for up to 35 daily sessions, which is sufficient for most small creative business websites. Paid plans are available for higher traffic volumes.
Will Hotjar affect my Showit website’s load speed?
Hotjar’s tracking script has a minimal impact on load speed. Like all third-party scripts, it adds a small amount of overhead, but Hotjar’s code is optimized to load efficiently without blocking page rendering.
Can I use Hotjar alongside Google Analytics on Showit?
Yes. Both tools can run simultaneously from Showit’s header code section without conflict. They serve complementary purposes: Google Analytics provides traffic and channel data while Hotjar provides behavioral and interaction data.
How many sessions do I need before heatmap data is meaningful?
Hotjar generally recommends at least 100 sessions on a given page before drawing conclusions from heatmap data. For pages with lower traffic, allow more time before interpreting patterns.
Does Hotjar track behavior on Showit’s mobile canvas separately?
Hotjar tracks behavior on whatever the visitor’s browser renders, which may be your desktop or mobile layout depending on the device. You can filter session recordings and heatmaps by device type in Hotjar’s dashboard to analyze mobile-specific behavior separately.
