Heat map website tools help you understand how visitors interact with your site by showing where they click, how far they scroll, and which parts of a page capture their attention.
These user behavioral insights can inform decisions about your site’s design and ecommerce user experience.
For example, fashion brand Ted Baker used heat maps and other behavioral data to guide updates to site navigation and page sections as part of a broader rebuild of their Shopify store that resulted in a 107% increase in conversion rate and 16% increase in average order value (AOV).
Learn how heat maps work, explore different types of heat maps, and discover ways to use them to improve your ecommerce site.
What is a heat map and how does it work?
A website heat map is a visual representation of user engagement on a webpage. This type of data-visualization tool helps you understand user behavior by identifying which parts of your site visitors engage with or ignore. Heat map tools often have separate maps for mobile and desktop versions of a page.
Heat map tools like Contentsquare (formerly Hotjar) and Heatmap use tracking software to collect user interaction data, such as mouse clicks, cursor movements, or scrolling. The software aggregates these data points for data analysis, helping you quickly identify patterns in user behavior.
Heat maps then overlay a color gradient on the webpage to represent different data values. Rather than displaying numeric values, heat maps use color intensity to make patterns easier to identify. Warmer colors generally represent areas with higher engagement, while cooler colors represent areas with lower engagement.
Types of heat maps
Different types of heat maps make complex data about how users interact with your site easier to interpret. Each type represents data differently and measures different behaviors; choose the type that best suits your website optimization goals.
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Click and tap maps: These heat maps show where visitors click on desktop devices (or tap on mobile devices), revealing which page elements receive the most and least interaction. They can also show when visitors try to click non-clickable elements, which may indicate the page design is unclear or has web accessibility issues.
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Mouse-tracking heat maps: Mouse trackers show where desktop users move or hover their cursors. Mouse movement can suggest which areas attract attention, although cursor location doesn’t always correspond with where a visitor is looking.
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Scroll maps: Scroll maps visualize scroll depth, or how far users scroll down a page, helping you identify where users tend to stop scrolling and what web content they might miss.
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Attention heat maps: An attention map combines multiple behavioral signals like clicks, mouse movements, and scrolling, to provide a broader view of how visitors engage with different areas of a page.
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Segmented heat maps: This type breaks heat map data into groups based on criteria such as device, location, or new versus returning visitors, allowing you to compare how different audiences use your site.
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Eye-tracking heat maps: Unlike other website heat maps, eye-tracking maps typically require specialized equipment or software and participants in a dedicated study. They show where users look on a webpage, helping you identify which elements attract visual attention and which may be overlooked.
Ways to use heat maps to improve your website
- Optimize layouts
- Identify popular elements
- Improve the user experience
- Spot technical issues
- Guide A/B testing
Heat maps help you make data-driven decisions instead of operating on a hunch. You can use visual insights from heat maps to identify changes to your site worth testing and then measure the results to determine whether those changes improved engagement, website conversions, or other relevant metrics.
Here are several ways you can use different heat maps to improve your site:
Optimize layouts
Heat maps can help you understand whether your website page layout is making important content easy for visitors to reach. Scroll maps, in particular, can reveal where visitors tend to stop scrolling and which elements they may never see.
For example, if a product page has a lower-than-expected ecommerce conversion rate, you can use a scroll map to investigate whether the page layout may be a factor.
If the map shows that many visitors stay above the fold, they’re likely missing later sections like customer reviews and user-generated content (UGC) that provide valuable social proof. With this information, you might test layouts featuring some of this content or anchor links to it higher on the page.
Identify popular elements
Heat maps can help you identify the content and interactive elements that attract the most attention on a page. This can help you decide whether to feature similar content elsewhere on your site.
For example, if a FAQ page has a relatively high average engagement time compared with other pages on your site, you can use an attention heat map to investigate what’s capturing visitors’ interest.
If the heat map shows visitors spending substantial time reading FAQs about granular product specifications, you might revise your product pages to include more detail. Or, maybe the details are there, but they’re not prominent enough to be noticed. If so, you might reconsider the current visual hierarchy.
Improve the user experience
Heat maps can help you identify points of customer friction where visitors struggle to interact with your site as intended. Segmented heat maps can be particularly useful for comparing the experience of different groups, such as mobile and desktop users.
For example, if your site has a lower engagement rate among mobile visitors than desktop visitors, you can use segmented heat maps to investigate how those interactions differ. If mobile shoppers repeatedly tap a product image that isn’t interactive, it may mean they expect the image to expand or show additional photos. You could test adding that functionality to your mobile site.
Or, perhaps there are lots of clicks and bounces on your mobile site. Are call to action (CTA) buttons or navigational links too close to one another? If so, users may be accidentally hitting the wrong link and backing out, potentially frustrating them in the process.
In the US, 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women are color blind. This is one of many reasons why website accessibility is necessary in your design layouts, data visualizations, and digital customer journey map.
Spot technical issues
Heat maps can help you investigate unexpected changes in site performance. User interactions captured in a heat map may point to technical problems, such as broken links or other elements that don’t respond as intended.
For example, if your add-to-cart rate suddenly drops, you can use tap or click maps to see whether shoppers are interacting with the Add to Cart button as expected. If mobile users repeatedly select the button but don’t progress to the cart, you might test the button and make sure it works properly across mobile devices.
Guide A/B testing
A/B testing compares two versions of a webpage or page element to see which performs better. Heat maps don’t directly serve as A/B tests, but they can help you identify behaviors worth investigating and develop hypotheses to test. After running an A/B test, you can compare heat maps for each variant to better understand how visitors interacted with different versions.
For example, if a click or tap map shows that visitors frequently interact with a short call to action but engage less with longer CTAs, you might hypothesize that CTA length affects engagement.
You could then A/B test versions of the same CTA with different copy lengths and compare their click or tap maps to see how visitors interact with each version. Eye-tracking heat maps can support more extensive A/B testing that involves recruiting users for a monitored study.
Shopify heat map integrations
You can add heat map capabilities to your Shopify store through apps in the Shopify App Store. These tools can help collect and analyze visitor behavior, while Shopify’s built-in features can help put those findings in context and make changes to your store.
Here are three heat map apps available for Shopify, along with Shopify tools that complement them.
Lucky Orange
Lucky Orange combines heat maps and session recordings with tools for identifying friction in the buying journey. You can see where shoppers click, scroll, and get stuck, track cart abandonment and checkout drop-off, and use conversion funnels to follow visitors through the conversion process, from browsing to purchase.
Lucky Orange also offers visitor surveys and integrates with the AI assistant Shopify Sidekick, allowing you to ask questions about store performance using your visitor and sales data.
Infinite Microsoft Clarity
Infinite Microsoft Clarity offers no-code setup for adding heat maps and session recordings to your Shopify store. Its heat maps show user clicks, scrolling, and page movements, while session recordings let you review individual browsing sessions. You can also track the behavior of visitors who arrive through Microsoft Shopping ads.
Propel Replay
Propel Replay combines heat maps with live and recorded session replays, onsite surveys, and AI-powered analysis. Its heat maps can help you identify elements shoppers overlook, such as add-to-cart buttons, while its session recordings show where visitors encounter friction or abandon their carts.
If you don’t want to review individual recordings, AI replay summaries and an AI assistant can help you analyze shopper behavior and identify potential conversion issues.
Shopify Analytics and theme editor
Once you’ve collected enough data to identify patterns, use heat maps alongside business analytics to put those behaviors in context. Shopify Analytics provides metrics such as sessions, sales, and conversions, helping you evaluate whether the behaviors you see in a heat map correspond with your store’s performance.
You can then use Shopify’s theme editor to act on many of your findings without editing code. For example, if a scroll map shows that few visitors reach an important section of a product page, you can rearrange sections or blocks to move the content higher.
After making a change, continue monitoring your heat maps and Shopify Analytics to see how visitor behavior and store performance respond.
Heat map FAQ
What is a heat map used for?
Heat maps are used to understand how visitors interact with a web page. They can help you identify which elements attract attention, how far visitors scroll, and where they click or tap, providing insights you can use to improve your site’s design and user experience.
Does Google have a heat map tool?
Google doesn’t have a heat map tool. However, you can use Google Analytics’s Path exploration feature to learn how users move through your website. You can also combine Google Analytics with another tool like Contentsquare.
How do I create a heat map?
Start by choosing a heat map tool and installing and configuring it on your site. Let it collect enough visitor data to identify meaningful patterns before analyzing the results and making decisions.
