Best WordPress Heatmap Plugins and Tools

If you’re interested in understanding your average website visitors better, there are several tools available to help you do so. However, platforms that gather user data—such as Google Analytics—can’t tell you exactly what draws your visitors’ focus the most.

Luckily, heatmaps are an accessible tool you can implement on your site to gather this valuable information, such as visitor behavior. Understanding what visitors are actually looking at when they scroll through your website can help you create the maximum impact with your design and content choices to improve the user experience and increase user activity. 

In this article, we’ll briefly discuss how to use an attention heatmap and the data it provides to improve your WordPress site. Then we’ll introduce some of the best heatmap plugins and tools. Let’s get started! 

Using a Heatmap Plugin in WordPress

Heatmaps are a highly-visual tool. They provide a layer of color over your website pages that indicate ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ areas. The parts of your site that get the most attention from visitors will be highlighted in red. 

Less engaging sections will show up as unhighlighted, or in cooler colors such as purple, blue, or green. Orange and yellow typically indicate areas of moderate interest, where only some users have taken the time to view content.

This information is different from what other website analytics tools provide. While you might be able to see which of your pages are the most popular in Google Analytics, you can’t discern what about them is attractive to visitors.

A heatmap, on the other hand, can tell you exactly how leads are interacting with your pages, including how far they scroll, what they click on, and more. This information can help you make decisions about your content and design, in order to appeal to your visitors’ interests and tastes.

Best Heatmap Plugins

In order to generate heatmaps for your WordPress posts and pages, you’ll need a plugin or another third party tool. Fortunately, there are plenty of quality options available. To help you get started, we’ve listed a few of them below.

1. CrazyEgg

The CrazyEgg plugin for WordPress adds a tracking script to your site, in order to monitor your visitors’ behavior. You can then use CrazyEgg’s many data tools – including heatmapping – to better understand your users and improve your site accordingly.

An easy way to determine if this tool is for you is to take advantage of CrazyEgg’s 30-day free trial. Once it’s over, plans are reasonably priced starting at $24 per month. You can add team members to your account at no extra charge, making this an ideal platform for collaboration. 

The only real downside is that viewing mobile and desktop snapshots at the same time can be tricky. Despite that, CrazyEgg is a very popular heatmap tool. The plugin for WordPress makes adding the tracking script easier, but it’s not essential to the platform’s functionality. 

2. Contentsquare

Built to tackle digital experience challenges, Contentsquare is a stand-alone tool designed for visitor recordings to help capture and interpret customer behaviors on your website. The developers’ experience with big-name customers—including Zoom, Bose, and Visa—speaks to the quality of their product.

In addition to heatmaps, Contentsquare has several other high-end features such as session replays, which enable you to play back a WordPress user’s actions. This could be especially helpful for testing and auditing. 

However, this platform may not be the best solution for smaller WordPress sites. It’s geared more towards enterprise-level analytics tracking, and you’ll need to schedule a meeting to find out how much Contentsquare will cost you. There’s also no plugin for easy integration.

3. Mouseflow

Mouseflow is a heatmap tool that can record all user activities anonymously, and display key trends in an easy-to-read format. Its heatmap feature can show you where in the world your users are located, in addition to their clicks, mouse movements, and more. 

There’s also a WordPress plugin available for Mouseflow, to help you easily integrate the tool with your WordPress site. You can test it out for 14 days before submitting your payment information to make sure it’s the right fit.

Compared with other tools, Mouseflow is a bit on the pricey side. Plans start at 29€ (about $31) per month) for 2,500 page views. If you want your whole team to be able to access your data, however, you’ll need the 399€ Pro plan. Budget-wise, this platform is probably best for smaller sites.

4. Lucky Orange

Lucky Orange offers so much more than heatmaps. It’s a powerful conversion-boosting toolkit that comes equipped with anonymous customer recordings and in-depth funnel analysis. It can even provide sales chat functionality to help you connect with leads.

The LuckyOrange WordPress plugin will automatically insert your tracking codes for an easy setup process.

However, if you want to store data for more than 30 days, you’ll have to purchase storage extensions. LuckyOrange’s branding will also be included in your chat windows, unless you purchase an add-on to remove it.

Using Website Heatmap Data to Improve Your Site

First impressions are pretty important online. You have very little time to capture a site visitor’s attention and guide them to your Call to Action (CTA). Heatmaps are an excellent way to gather data on whether your design is working or not. 

When you examine your heatmaps, there are a few things in particular to look out for. The first is at what point users stop scrolling. This can point out areas where they’re becoming bored or distracted, indicating a flaw in the design or content.

It’s also helpful to note where users are clicking. You can analyze this information to determine if your CTAs need revising, or if visitors are confused about which elements are clickable. Finally, you’ll want to compare your desktop and mobile heatmaps, to determine if your design is translating across devices.

Combining heatmaps with a split-testing approach can help you assess different design options, to see which is best for accomplishing your goals for your site. Many of the tools we’ve covered in this post include A/B testing functionality for this very reason.

Optimize Your Site With WP Engine

Heatmaps and other analytics tools are a smart way to optimize your users’ digital experience. At WP Engine, we strive to provide some of the best resources for bloggers and developers, to help you improve your site’s design, performance, and more.

Plus, with the power of WP Engine WordPress hosting and the knowledge gained from user behavior tracking behind you, keeping your site in tip-top shape is a breeze. Check out our plans today!