Most website analytics tools — including Google Analytics — tell you what visitors do: which pages they visited, how long they stayed, and whether they left without doing anything. What they cannot tell you is why. Heatmaps fill that gap by showing you the actual behaviour of visitors on a given page, laid over a screenshot of the page itself.
The Three Types of Heatmap
Most heatmap tools offer three types of view, each answering a slightly different question:
- Click maps. These show where visitors click on a page. You can see which buttons get pressed, which links attract attention, and — importantly — where visitors click on things that are not actually links, which often reveals confusion about the page layout. If lots of people click on an image expecting it to be clickable, that is useful information.
- Scroll maps. These show how far down the page visitors scroll before leaving. The colour fades from red at the top (where everyone reaches) to blue further down (where fewer people get to). A scroll map can reveal that most of your visitors never actually see your contact details or pricing information because they stop scrolling before they reach it. Moving important content higher up the page in response to this can have a significant impact on enquiries.
- Move maps. These show where visitors move their mouse cursor on a desktop screen. People tend to look where their cursor moves, so a move map gives you a rough sense of where attention is being directed across the page. This is less useful than click and scroll maps for most small business owners, but can be helpful when reviewing page layouts.
What Heatmaps Actually Reveal for Small Businesses
For a small business website, heatmaps most commonly surface a handful of revealing patterns:
- Your call-to-action is below where most people stop scrolling. If your "Get a quote" button is at the bottom of the page but 70% of visitors never scroll that far, your button is effectively invisible. Moving it higher — or adding a second button earlier on the page — can meaningfully increase enquiries.
- Visitors are clicking on something that is not a link. If visitors are repeatedly clicking on a heading, an image, or a piece of bold text expecting it to do something, that is a signal that your page design is creating confusion. Either make the element clickable or redesign it to look less interactive.
- Nobody reads past the hero section. The "hero" is the large top section of a page. If your scroll map shows that most visitors do not get beyond the first screen, the content below it — however good — is not being seen. This often means the hero section is not compelling enough to encourage people to keep reading.
- The contact form is being ignored. A heatmap showing minimal interaction around your contact form, combined with low enquiry rates, suggests the form may be too long, too confusing, or positioned somewhere that visitors do not naturally reach.
Free Heatmap Tools Worth Knowing About
You do not need to spend money to use heatmaps. Two free tools are genuinely good:
- Microsoft Clarity. Completely free, with no visitor limits. It provides click maps, scroll maps, and session recordings (which let you watch replays of individual visitor journeys through your site). Clarity is owned by Microsoft and integrates well with Google Analytics. For most small businesses, Clarity is all you will ever need and it costs nothing.
- Hotjar. The most well-known heatmap tool. The free plan includes basic heatmaps and a limited number of session recordings per month. It has a slightly more polished interface than Clarity and is very easy to set up. If you outgrow the free plan, paid tiers start at around £30 per month.
Both tools work by adding a small snippet of code to your website — typically a single line that a developer adds once, or that can be added via Google Tag Manager without touching your website code directly.
Do You Need a Developer to Set Up a Heatmap Tool?
Not necessarily. If you are on Wix, Squarespace, or WordPress, both Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar offer official integrations that you can install through your platform's settings panel without editing any code. If your website is custom-built, a developer can add the tracking snippet in a few minutes. Either way, once it is installed, you log into the heatmap tool's website to view your reports — no ongoing technical work is required.
Is a Heatmap Tool Right for Your Business Right Now?
Heatmaps are most useful when you have a question to answer. If your website is getting a reasonable amount of traffic but not generating the enquiries or sales you would expect, a heatmap is an excellent first step towards understanding why. If your website is brand new and only getting a handful of visitors per week, wait until you have built up more traffic — you need a reasonable number of visitors on a page before the heatmap data becomes meaningful.
As a rough guide, a page needs at least 100 to 200 visitors before a heatmap becomes genuinely informative. If you are getting that sort of traffic, adding a free heatmap tool like Microsoft Clarity takes about fifteen minutes and costs nothing. The insights it provides can be more valuable than any amount of guesswork about why your website is or is not working.