The Hotjar blog

Hotjar’s Coming in Hot Report revealed consumers have different needs, challenges, and expectations for website design based on a brand’s specific industry. Let’s dig into how their preferences vary between ecommerce, healthcare, and financial sites to reveal how these brands can improve their online presence.

The term 'omnichannel' has long surpassed its initial buzzword status to become a cornerstone of modern retail strategy. The consumer landscape has changed dramatically, driven by technological advancements and evolving consumer preferences. 

Today's consumers are channel-agnostic and incredibly discerning, often interacting with brands across multiple touchpoints before making a purchase.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a popular inbound marketing strategy for good reason. Done well, it works wonders—magnetically drawing users from Google to your website. 

But writing for SEO is challenging. Search engines use complex algorithms to sift through billions of pieces of content, selecting a treasured top ten for each query. You have to use a seemingly magic combination of ingredients on your web page for a chance at a high-ranking spot on the list.

Stepping into a marketing leadership role can stir up a mix of emotions: excitement, optimism, and, often, a gnawing doubt. "Do I have the right skills to truly lead and inspire?" If you've ever wrestled with these uncertainties, you're not alone.

Whether you’re a seasoned sales representative or a marketing newcomer, each conversation with a potential customer is an opportunity to nurture a lasting relationship and drive business goals forward. 

But without a clear strategy and solid call preparation, you may leave customers unengaged or unconvinced, leading to lost sales and revenue.

So how do you ensure you’re fully equipped to meet—and exceed—a prospect’s needs and expectations before you’re on the call?

Whether you're sifting through campaign attribution data or reviewing performance reports from different sources, extracting meaningful business insights from vast amounts of data is an often daunting—yet critical—task many marketers face. So how do you efficiently evaluate your results and communicate key learnings? 

This is where business intelligence (BI) tools come in, transforming raw data into actionable insights that drive informed, customer-centric decisions. 

Today, marketing trends evolve at the speed of technology. Ecommerce businesses that fail to update their marketing strategies to meet consumers where they are in 2023 will be left out of the conversations that drive brand success. 

If you’re just starting out on your ecommerce journey, you’ll have one critical question: which platform is the perfect fit for your business?

With so many options, from full-scale ecommerce solutions to website builders, it’s not easy knowing which one will set your online business up for success.

From hidden shipping costs to an overly complicated checkout process, there are many reasons online shoppers ditch their carts without completing a purchase.

While abandoned shopping carts are common for many ecommerce brands, they don't have to be. By understanding why people abandon their carts, you can address these common cart abandonment reasons in advance, enabling you to optimize your ecommerce site, win happy customers, and make more sales.

Choosing which ecommerce platform to launch your store on is no small decision. You’re picking the policies that’ll govern your business for its whole life, and a set of technical capabilities that’ll make or break the customer experience. 

With more than 2 million daily users, Shopify is the Titan of ecommerce platforms. BigCommerce, with around 1 million users overall, is hot on its heels. Weighing up the merits of Shopify vs Bigcommerce is no mean feat, not least since they’re both great platforms that host thousands of successful ecommerce businesses.

As an ecommerce business owner (or a soon-to-be one), you have a long list of decisions to make.

Choosing a platform to host your store is a big one. Got Shopify and WooCommerce among your options and want a thorough comparison of the two? You’re in the right place.

Choosing the right platform for your ecommerce store can be tricky. With slick marketing campaigns, long lists of features, and countless reviews to consider, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed before you even make your first sale.

That’s why we’ve done the hard work for you and compared two of the most popular ecommerce platforms. Who will come out on top in the battle between Shopify vs Wix?

It's no secret that bad or broken user experience (UX) drives up cart abandonment and, consequently, revenue loss. But cart abandonment reasons differ from brand to brand, site to site, and user to user.

Hear it straight from your customers when you create relevant surveys with the Hotjar Surveys tool. By including the voice of the customer (VoC) in your analysis, you’ll unlock insights that help fine-tune your UX and, ultimately, improve conversions and sales.

Online shopping is the future—and the future is definitely here. 

If you’re a brick-and-mortar retailer, it’s increasingly difficult to remain relevant without an online store. Customers expect the convenience and variety of online shopping, and meeting your customer’s expectations is essential to remain in business.

Are you investing significant effort and budget into your SEO, ads, and overall marketing but seeing no increase in sales? If users fill their carts on your site only to abandon them, much of that investment goes to waste.

But you already know this—that’s why you’re looking for cart abandonment statistics: to benchmark your online store against and determine what you really need to change in your ecommerce buying experience.

It’s hard to avoid all the water cooler talk about a looming recession. 

If you spend any time on social media—today’s virtual water cooler—a quick scroll through your feed will have you anxiously gripping your computer mouse and googling ways to recession-proof your business.

Hotjar’s heatmaps and recordings provide context to real data. Here’s how the Hotjar team uses their tools to improve site performance and marketing efforts. 

Brands worry about how to treat customers. The answer is to show them love by listening and creating flawless experiences that aren’t frustrating. Here’s how. 

The customer is at the center of all marketing activities in product-led marketing, ultimately driving their success. Here’s how we use product-led marketing at Hotjar. 

There’s no perfect organization structure, but implementing marketing squads at Hotjar has increased happiness and efficiency—here’s how we made it work.

It’s easy to guess what our customers want. But assuming we know them better than they know themselves can lead to failed campaigns, miscommunication, and churn. 

Happy customers spend more and shop with you for longer, and a positive experience is often valued more than price as a core brand differentiator. 

The trick for online shops is how to build that happiness—and there’s a good chance it starts with ecommerce search.

From pinpointing your target audience and assessing your competitive advantage, to ongoing product development and customer satisfaction efforts, market research is a practice your business can only benefit from.

Learn how to conduct quick and effective market research using a lean approach in this article full of strategies and practical examples. 

You can now install the Hotjar tracking code on your WordPress website from the newly released, official Hotjar plugin for WordPress. Watch the 1-min video below to learn how.

When you get on a website and read a wall of customer testimonials that gush with nothing but praise, it’s not surprising if your first reactions are skepticism or suspicion.

At Hotjar, we use Hotjar in everything we do.

Whether it’s building, writing, scaling, designing, or hiring - Hotjar helps us make Hotjar better. We’re firm believers of practicing what we preach (and we 100% believe in our product) so using Hotjar to grow Hotjar is a must for our team.

I was hired by Hotjar last year to lead content, which I thought meant the blog, but it didn’t. Our CEO, David Darmanin, had a much wider scope in mind. It just took me a while to figure that out.

Once I did, the idea to launch a podcast began to evolve (the evolution of which we’ll cover in our next post, because it’s an interesting story of trial, error, and a picture of a light-saber wielding Rand Fishkin).

And now, we are launching 'The Humans Strike Back' as a podcast, and a website, and a community about helping each other succeed as individuals, as employees, and as business owners by putting people first.

Rand Fishkin found success by transforming his mother’s small business marketing firm into a $45M+ marketing software company. Over the course of 11 years, he helped to design and launch a multitude of software products and made his fair share of mistakes.

Lucky for you, Rand is an open book.

Here are four lessons he learned building a $45M software company, based on a conversation we had with Rand Fishkin on Hotjar’s podcast 'The Humans Strike Back'.

Ask 10 marketers about marketing funnels and you’ll probably get 10 different answers. Why is that? A marketing funnel isn't a one-size-fits-all strategy; your marketing funnel is uniquely tailored to how your buyer buys.

Most startup founders dream of creating a single successful company.

David Cancel has done it 5 times.

His latest company, Drift, has already raised $107 million in funding and acquired over 70,000 active users in just 4 years.

So how did he do it?

The key has been a customer-driven methodology that David stumbled upon almost by accident at one of his previous companies.

Sticking an opt-in gate in front of your content and counting how many people go through it has become the go-to solution to measure lead generation and marketing success. But is inundating people with pop-ups that promise mind-blowing content in exchange for their email address really the best way to go about building your brand/business?

If you’re building a startup or digital business (or want to), the worst thing you can ever do is fail slowly.

Failing fast and often won’t hurt you in the long run because you can recover or change course quickly. In fact, failure is part of the entrepreneurial world and building a business. But it needs to be fast.

Just to be clear – by failure, I'm not just referring to the entire business. It might be a feature, your onboarding, or the user experience.

David Brown talks about “failing fast” this way:

“Fail fast isn’t about the big issues, it’s about the little ones. It’s an approach to running a company or developing a product that embraces lots of little experiments with the idea that some will work and grow and others will fail and die.”

Yet, again and again, people with ideas spend too much time obsessing over the theory and the big idea – but at the end of the day, what matters the most is how quickly and effectively you can get to a big enough share of your target market.

Because, if you're too slow to take your idea to market...

...you risk ending up dead in the water.

In this post, I want to let you in on the entire process that went into developing ‘The Humans Strike Back’ by Hotjar; a podcast, a website, and a community about helping each other succeed as individuals, as employees, and as business owners by putting people first.

It’s been a winding road, but hopefully, in seeing how this idea developed, you’ll gain insight into how to create your own purpose-driven marketing campaign that not only shines a spotlight on your company, but makes the world a better place for humans to live. Some of this may sound familiar, if you’ve signed up for our emails, but here I go into even greater depth and share the whole story of our journey to get back to being human.

It was my first job in digital marketing and I wanted to make an impression as quickly as possible.

I was working for a SaaS company in Dublin and one of my objectives was to increase the conversion rate from visitors to paid customers.

I really had no clue where to start.

I remember looking at the websites of major SaaS companies to get some ideas: Mailchimp, SalesForce, Zendesk...

Zendesk's registration form caught my eye. They only had two fields: "First Name" and "Email".

We had eight.

I remember searching for articles mentioning best practices on how to increase form conversions and found plenty. The vast majority had “Reduce the number of fields” as the first item in their list.

In the world of marketing, there is no shortage of approaches and strategies.

One such method is called customer-centric marketing. We were fortunate enough to interview Bill Macaitis, a marketing leader who served Salesforce, Zendesk, and Slack, about this approach, and learn exactly how customer-centric marketing has helped him—and can help you—grow these companies.

Let’s face it: something is probably off if potential customers leave your ecommerce site before they make it past the first page they land on. Whether they can’t find what they’re looking for or just don’t like what they see, it’s essential for any ecommerce business to be aware of what pages visitors ‘bounce’ from in high numbers—and why. 

This article covers several customer-centric tools for understanding and reducing ecommerce bounce rate.

WordPress powers over 33% of the web, making it the world’s most popular content management system (CMS). With that number of websites comes a huge amount of owners, marketers, product managers, and UX professionals who can benefit from learning more about the behavior and needs of people who visit their sites.

In this quick article, we show you how to use Hotjar’s official WordPress plugin, which makes it easier for any WordPress user to install Hotjar and start collecting useful behavior and feedback insights. We also share five ways to use Hotjar heatmaps, surveys, and session recordings to spot bugs, increase conversions, and improve user experience on your WordPress site.

While product, UX, and marketing teams help shape a website or app’s homepage, a more powerful group holds the reins: the users. Their needs and preferences are key deciding factors in locking in an effective homepage design.

Data is a crucial part of building a product your customers love. But just how much should you rely on data, and how do you ensure it works in the best interests of your team—and end-users?

Over the past five years, buyers have largely shifted their shopping habits to be primarily online. For brands wishing to remain competitive in the digital marketplace, this means an accessible and attention-grabbing website has become more important than ever before. 

Consumers agree: respondents to Hotjar’s Coming in Hot report told us that they have higher expectations for brands’ websites than they did five years ago.

Consumers have more than their fair share of vendors to choose from when shopping online. When attention is split between different brands and devices, ensuring your online presence stands out from the crowd hinges on first impressions. 

But catering to the ever-changing habits and preferences of digital buyers is no small feat. That’s why Hotjar surveyed hundreds of US-based consumers—to reveal the insights you need to guarantee your website exceeds user expectations.

We don’t just design and build Hotjar—we’re users, too. Insights from Hotjar regularly drive our decisions, keeping customer-centricity top of mind. 

This article unpacks how our product design team uses Hotjar for interaction design, a sub-discipline of user experience (UX) design.

Here's a hard truth: some customers lose their initial excitement toward your company's products or services as time passes; others choose your competitors' offerings from the get-go. More often than not, this failure to resonate with target customers reveals an “It's not you, it's us” situation: it shows you've neglected to understand what users truly want and need.

You're here because you know better than to let this happen. As a designer, you want to polish your approach and pick up on the finer details of the user experience (UX). And if you’re hoping to win people’s business and loyalty, you're right to shift your focus to empathy-driven design.

You can only choose a wonderful present if you really know the person you’re buying it for. By the same token, you can only create an outstanding product or service when you really know the person you’re building it for. 

That’s the theory behind the ideal customer profile (ICP) framework. 

You've painstakingly built a website to capture users' heads and hearts. But despite your effort, the site's bounce rates are high, conversions could be better, and users abandon their shopping carts faster than a kitten chasing a laser pointer. 

This is the story of many website designers, UX designers, and online businesses—and these all-too-common issues are often symptoms of user frustration. 

No business can please all prospects all the time (if you can, tell us your secrets!). But suppose a customer is unhappy with your brand, product, or service. Would you rather hear it from them directly, or find out by chance on social media or third-party review sites?

Capturing direct feedback from real users certainly sounds like the better option—and, luckily, it’s become much easier to do. 

Nowadays, small and midsize businesses (SMBs) with limited resources can conduct online surveys at any point of the buyer's journey—for free. With best-in-class survey tools, you can customize the survey flow and elements, deploy your questionnaire, and collect quality responses faster than ever.

Feedback is a powerful way to connect with your customers, get objective opinions, and make optimizations that have a real impact. 

But proactively requesting user insights can be challenging, and responses are often vague or irrelevant. Navigating these pain points is crucial for making the most of your customers’ feedback.

Your team has been working hard on a brand-new website, and you’re ready to hit ‘publish’. Or, at least, you think you are. How can you be confident your site is up to scratch when nobody’s even seen it yet?

Creating a website prototype gives you an outside perspective from real people—and the opportunity to fix issues before you go live.

In our digital age, creating a great-looking webpage is no longer enough to draw in customers. Your website needs to be trustworthy, user-friendly, and fast-loading to encourage customers to stay and purchase your product. 

In short, your web page needs to offer a great user experience (UX).

But how do you create a great user experience? With constant updates to search engine algorithms, it can be tricky to know what to focus on to make a difference.

Tracking where users move and rest their mouse cursors helps you build an image of what attracts attention (or doesn’t) on any website page or product interface. At Hotjar, we call this visualization a move map.

Do you want to stop guessing and start creating products your customers will love and use repeatedly while referring others to your brand? 

Email surveys are a convenient, cost-effective way to collect feedback and understand how your users feel about your website, product, or service, so you can identify what delights or frustrates them and improve their experience and your metrics.

Success in a crowded digital landscape lies in one key element: which companies provide the most outstanding user experience (UX)? As more businesses tap into user insights, those with an advanced UX analytics approach set themselves up to win. How do the best in the game do it? With the right tools for creating a website or product that truly resonates with users.

Where do you start, and keep, learning about user experience design? UX Goodies creator Ioana Teleanu shares the six UX books at the top of her list. Research, feedback, communication, emotion—it’s all here.

UX research and design is the foundation for building great products that users love and return to. But getting buy-in for UX can be a frustrating challenge. UX educator and mentor Ioana Teleanu shares her experience and tips for how to get buy-in for your UX projects.

There’s never been a more exciting time to be a UX designer. But that doesn't mean it’s easy. Here, UX educator and mentor Ioana Teleanu shares her take on the most important UX design challenges, and how to deal with them.

Design driven companies are on the rise and user feedback becomes the bedrock of business. Here’s what it means to be design-driven and why it’s important.

Guest author Matt Diggity shows how you can improve your brand identity by conducting more surveys with your customers.

One of our values is that we challenge ourselves to grow. By hosting external speakers and sharing their ideas, we’re hoping to inspire you, our Hotjar community, to grow too. 

Before a brand or business launches a new product or idea, it undergoes a long process to get approved. There's always room for negotiation, but you have to get feedback and be open to altering plans accordingly with your team.

Product feedback is one of a product management team’s most effective tools, but only when that feedback comes with the proper context.

Imagine you’re running a brick-and-mortar store. From your perch at the counter, you can see and fix any issues the customers have as they move around the shop: if they have trouble navigating the aisles, you can make adjustments and help out; when they come up to the counter, you can strike up a conversation and learn who they are and what they’re looking for.

At Hotjar, customer feedback is at the core of what we do. We want all of our team members to obsess over the wants, needs, and opinions of our users and customers, and in turn, we encourage our users and customers to obsess over their users and customers. It’s a virtuous cycle where everybody can have the best experience possible.

There are no quick hacks or fancy solutions here: the most direct way to find out what’s working (or not) for customers is by simply asking them. In this article, we show you why you should collect feedback from customers, how to do it, and how to use that information to make positive changes.

There’s a reason why moving junk food to a hard-to-reach shelf might help us eat less of it: the location is impractical, it’s going to take effort to reach it, and—unless the motivation is really strong—most of the time we end up not actually bothering.

Sometimes, online businesses are exactly like that hard-to-reach shelf: something impractical that requires extra effort and make people lose motivation and leave.

The good news is that there is a simple way to find out if that’s the case with your business: all you have to do is ask your visitors and customers how much effort they have to put into doing business with you. This is the Customer Effort Score (CES), and measuring it can help you make accurate predictions of future business success or failure. 

Visitors flow through your website every day, but somehow all of that traffic funnels down to just a trickle of conversions, sales, and signups. Funnel analysis can help you spot where users are leaving your website, so you can optimize it and increase conversions.

In this post, we’ll explain how you can analyze funnels to identify key traffic sources and spot high-exit pages. You’ll also learn how to combine funnel reports with more analytics insight, so you can send more traffic down the marketing funnel to the pages that matter.

Every time you update or redesign your website, there’s a risk of something unpredictable happening that breaks it—and every second where something’s going wrong is costing you money.

If you’ve ever been frustrated by an element on a website that doesn’t respond to your clicks (no matter how many times you try), you’re probably already familiar with the concept of rage-clicking—which is a good thing! Understanding your website visitors’ frustration means you can empathize with them.

Happy, successful customers are the heart and soul of any business. They’re what transform your growth from a funnel into a flywheel. 

You can create happy customers, but to do that you have to truly understand them and what they think about your business.

So how do you know what they’re thinking? You have to ask!

What do you know about your customers? Do you know what actually makes them buy or why they choose you?

Conventional wisdom says you can get to know your target audience by studying demographics such as age, ethnicity, and education. A few marketers go beyond that by taking psychographics criteria into consideration, such as attitudes, values, and desires.

But this is still misleading: if you want to define strategies to engage your customers, you need to truly understand their buying decisions.

How well do you understand your prospects and customers? Do you know who they are, what keeps them awake at night, and what brought them to your business in search of a solution?

Developing an accurate picture of your customers doesn’t need to cost you large amounts of money and effort.

There’s a time and a place for specialized tools, in-depth interviews, and complex datasets; but you can also do a lot with little—and asking your customers direct questions will give you a clear idea of who they are, so you can improve your website experience for them.

Unless you’re a mind reader, the only way to find out what your users are thinking is to ask them. That's what surveys are for. 

But the way you ask a question often determines the kind of answer you get—and one of the first decisions you have to make is: are you going to ask an open-ended or a closed-ended question?

Nobody knows more about what your users want than the users themselves. So why not ask them?

Regardless of what type of website you’re working on, surveying users on the page will give you the feedback you need to improve the user experience for your audience and increase conversions for your business.

In this guide, you’ll learn which survey questions to ask, our favorite survey question examples, where to ask questions on your site, and how to get started using an online survey tool like Hotjar.

If you really want to get inside your website visitors’ heads—to know what they actually think about your site, and how they think it could be better—you’re in the right place.

From page design to site usability, there are plenty of factors that impact user experience. Pinpointing what leads to a bad experience can seem like a daunting task. With heatmaps (also known as “heat maps”), you can visualize key user interactions and gather meaningful insights with ease to ensure your site delivers an outstanding UX throughout the entire user journey.

Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, has spent the past 30 years making fun of inefficiency in business—including our efforts to reduce inefficiency.

Here at Hotjar, we strongly believe that what’s best for your users and customers is best for your business. But how do you know what’s best for your users?

You have to ask them.

Traditional metrics like customer retention rate (CRR) and customer lifetime value (CLTV) are good to know, but they don't tell you the whole story of customer churn. To really make a difference in your retention rate, you need to know why customers stop using your product—and how you can get them to stick with it.

Have you ever wondered what your users think of your website? Sure you have. But have you let your users inform (even dictate) your design process? If you're like a lot of website owners in the world, your answer might be: maybe.

What changes can we make that will have the most positive impact on our users and customers? Why are some of them leaving and never coming back?

These are two very important questions Hotjar needs to answer to continue to grow, and in order to answer them, we need user feedback.

One way to collect it is to ask the Net Promoter Score® (NPS) question:

“How likely are you to recommend Hotjar to a friend or colleague?” on a scale of zero to 10 (with 10 being extremely likely).

When we first launched Hotjar, success was anything but guaranteed. We were completely unknown, didn’t have a cent of outside funding, and were facing some well-known competitors.

Five years later, we’ve gone from €0 to €17 million in Annual Recurring Revenue and Hotjar has been installed on over 670,000 sites. And a huge factor in reaching this level of growth has been our commitment to staying close to our customers.

In this article, we share the exact methods we use to stay in touch with our customers year-round, and how we collect and measure user feedback to constantly improve our website and product experience.

✏️  Note: we are a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company, but the techniques we cover in this post are highly applicable to your e-commerce and/or lead generation business.

Whatever business you're in, it's crucial to keep your finger on the collective pulse of your customers. Are they growing more or less happy with you?

Developing a product without user feedback is like having a relationship without conversation. (Not great.)

And while there are plenty of ways to learn about your users—like watching session recordings, A/B testing, and even scouring forums where they spend their time—online surveys are one of the best ways to get direct user feedback.

You spent months planning your online event, and now that it’s over, it’s time to sit back and relax, right? Not so fast! After hosting an event, there’s one more thing you absolutely must do: send post-event surveys to your attendees.

When I started my career in sales, I found myself surrounded by people who were always obsessed with something: competitors, market trends, industry best practices. Some would keep constant track of who else was selling what, and how much of it; others would go to great lengths to steal clients from the competition.

We’d have weekly meetings where I would report on sales, and every single time we’d just look at these numbers going up and down on a spreadsheet. At one point, the marketing goal for the entire year was to get more fans on Facebook than one of our direct competitors.

Building a SaaS product, app, or site?

If you’re a Product Creator in any capacity, the way you build your product will dictate the level of success you'll achieve. Like me, you’ve seen products and apps come and go. Some disappear as quickly as they arrive, and some (like Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, et al) have achieved incredible success.

But, why is it that people get hooked on some products while others don't even make a ripple in the pond?

If you are expecting this to be a list of UX tools, devices or platforms then be prepared to be disappointed!

Being a rockstar at UX design means that you can deliver bankable and measurable results with your work... not eye-candy that impresses your friends and colleagues. So understandably, I chose to base this list on what I have learnt from seeing UX specialists at work on hundreds of projects, split tests and experiments.

Mastering these 8 skills might not be a simple feat - but the returns of achieving this will be worth the while. Every competitive organisation will pay handsomely for a UX rockstar!

Note: These observations are based on my work with several organisations that generated yearly revenue between 8 million to 250 million dollars and teams that varied between 3 to a dozen members.

Open-ended questions are great for getting authentic feedback because they give people a chance to describe what they’re experiencing in their own voice.

We know what it’s like to have pressing questions about a website—Who is really visiting it? What are these people looking for? Why are they not converting? What can we do to improve their experience?—and not having a clear sense of how to go about finding the answers.

If you don’t understand your customers, it’s almost impossible to improve your product or service for them.

Online surveys make it easy to get to know your users, but even a short, simple survey can leave you with a headache-inducing amount of user data to sort through.

So how do you make sense of it all? Read on to know how to conduct effective survey data analysis.

On average, for every 100$ of Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) being newly generated on a given day, $32 is lost one year after (which means we’re left with $68 of MRR).

Our revenue churn is therefore 32% - almost a third of our revenue - after one year, which means that our revenue retention is 68%.

Thankfully, we cover our churn losses by generating new revenue from new Hotjar customers.

But revenue churn is a parasite slowly eating us from the inside. We need to kill it now before it grows too big.

The very basis of UX Design is effective qualitative user research which is for the most part not achieved by reading - it's achieved by asking the right questions. When it comes to UX mistakes, more often than not it's the habits and processes we ourselves dictate that lead to a bad user experience. Let's explore some of the mistakes which might be easy to overlook but can have big negative consequences for your website.

Web forms have become an integral part of most websites and the internet in general. Their primary purpose is to help both users and businesses achieve their separate goals by establishing a relationship or initiating a conversation between the two.

- Registration forms are what allows people to become members of online communities or services. Think of Facebook - their 1 billion+ users all joined through a registration form;

- Checkout forms allow transactions to happen through the web. Subscribing to a paid service and people purchasing products are a couple of examples which happen through a checkout form;

- Data submission forms are how people share knowledge, post information and communicate online. Forums, blogs, and social communities all rely on users posting these forms for their websites to grow.

Even with their extensive importance online, it is surprisingly common to come across very poorly made forms - which is a shame. Here are some simple guidelines which are a good foundation for most types of forms.

First off, let’s explore what elements a form is made up of and some best practices.

Website usability is at the heart of customer-centricity. If you give your potential customers a difficult, complex, or broken experience, it’s unlikely they’ll stick with you for long.

When the market changes—like it's changing right now—and you suddenly get different online customers than the ones you are used to, how do you make sure your website works for all of them:

How can a company that specializes in conversion fail a launch so badly they almost have to let an entire team go?

More importantly, how did this company, ConversionXL, turn the six-month-long failure of their CXL Institute into a massive success using customer insights?

Peep Laja, the founder of CXL, sat down to walk us through the answers to these questions.

This is a case study about what to do when your big plans fall through, when your launch fails, when you feel out of step with what your customers actually need, and how to use customer insights to put you back on the right track.

Cloud hosting is used by almost everyone today, ranging from the newest startup companies to some of the biggest players in the industry (Pinterest, Airbnb and Netflix all run on publicly available clouds). Before the advent of cloud hosting, you had to buy or rent your servers and manage them yourself. This is still a viable approach if you have very specific needs, but for most use cases the cloud works remarkably well...however not without a couple of caveats.

The day may come when you feel you’ve hit a wall with your business. Your products are great, and you have an amazing team of talented professionals working with you, but still, you can't seem to grow past your current revenue numbers.

Could it be that you haven't given the customer experience enough attention?

One of the best ways to measure your success in this area is to track Net Promoter Score (NPS®). NPS is a crucial business metric that Taylor & Hart, the award-winning jeweler featured in this case study, uses religiously: it's helped them secure repeat business, expand their product offerings, and grow at an impressive pace.

We recently sat down with Stefan Milev, the company’s CMO, to discuss how Taylor & Hart has grown so quickly by using the NPS metric and obsessing (in a good way!) over the customer experience.

See the ‘copy to clipboard’ button below?  It helps thousands of new users a month copy the Hotjar code snippet and get started with our product.

Ah, the user interview. Without a doubt one of the most valuable exercises you can run for understanding users better. But how can you, the interviewer, make sure you get the insights you need (and end up with a happy interviewee)? The first stage is understanding what this is—and what it isn’t.

If you’re running an online marketing campaign, you probably want the same thing everybody else does: better performance.

In my experience as Director of Content at Klientboost, I’ve found that one of the most useful tools in the campaign-performance-improvement toolbox is landing page split-tests, where you design two different versions of the same page and test them against one another to see which one performs best.

The KB team has created and tested over 1000 pages at a rate of 250-300 tests/quarter—in this article, I will share a few ideas about how you and your team can also identify new ideas to test on your landing pages.

In this article, I’ll cover what tests have worked for our clients and how we sourced the ideas to test on their landing pages. After all, knowing how to run a good split test doesn’t do you any good if you have no idea what you’re testing—and why.

How much research did you conduct before launching your last marketing campaign? Or running your last A/B test? Who had the final say on your website redesign?

If you want to make better—more profitable—marketing decisions, you need research to back them. Qualitative and quantitative research both have a role to play: together, they give you a rich portrait of what your customers want and need.

At the time of writing, there are over 230,000 enabled surveys built with Hotjar in the world, which have gathered a total of 138,091,181 responses. That’s an average of 17 responses per every single person on the planet!

Why are visitors abandoning your website? Who are they? What do they think about your product? You can speculate endlessly about these answers—or you can get them by asking the actual people who visit your website every day.

Whether you’ve just launched a new product that isn’t selling as much as expected or you’re wanting to sell even more of one that’s already doing great, here’s one thing you should try: survey your customers to get some insight about what’s working and what needs improving.

I don’t mean ‘spend thousands of dollars on customer panels’ or ‘research an industry-defining report on customer expectations’: I mean take 30 literal minutes out of your day to get on a call with an existing customer, or create a quick survey and email it to people who have already bought one (or more) of your products.

In this piece, we take you through 5 of the best questions to ask your customers about the products and services you’re selling. To pick them, I spoke to two business leaders, Brian Dean (founder of Backlinko) and Sarah Doody (author of UX Notebook), who experienced a few snafus in their business and bounced back by reaching out to the only people who could help them figure out what to do: their existing customers.

Implementing an on-site survey right after your customers make a purchase is an easy, non-intrusive way to learn what you need to improve the buying experience and overcome potential objections.

Capturing this kind of website feedback is so valuable and simple that we recommend all our e-commerce customers do it—and we put together this quick guide to help you create a simple, post-purchase survey in just a few minutes. We’ll go over exactly what questions you should ask as well as where, when, and how to set it up.

What do you do when your website is not converting, your product is not working, and people are leaving you? How do you find out what’s wrong—so you can fix it?

To understand your customers, it's not enough to look at metrics like pageviews, bounce rates, and conversion rates alone—standard metrics are out of context and leave you guessing and making assumptions about what your customers need.

Leading minds in product, marketing, ecommerce, and UX came together over two days to shape the future of digital experiences at HOTSAUCE—Hotjar's inaugural in-person conference. Couldn’t make or want to relive the magic one more time? Take a trip through the event from the lens of the people there—Hotjar’s core planning team, speakers, and attendees—and read about their favorite moments, top learnings, and what they’re looking forward to at HOTSAUCE 2024.

Hotjar Dashboard is now Hotjar Dashboards—with an ‘s’. 🤯

Look, we get it. Every product and their dog has a dashboard. They’re not new.

But bear with us—this is way more exciting than it sounds. It’s one small ‘s’ for Dashboards, and one big win for your team.

It's November, and we've got exciting updates to share, from what happened last month to what’s coming soon. Sentiment analysis, improved research hub, popover surveys 2.0, and enhanced team collaboration... Take a look. 👇

It's October and we've got exciting updates to share, from what happened last month to what’s coming soon. New ways to surface insights, improved collaboration, and an event not to be missed. Take a look. 👇

It's August and we've got heaps of spicy updates to share, from what happened last month to what’s coming soon. 

A flaming hot conference, a platform now available in (even) more languages, sizzling Surveys updates, and more! 

We launched it, you tried it, and we’ve been improving it based on your feedback.

Multiple types of heatmaps—like click, move, and scroll heatmaps—have proven vital in visualizing complex interaction data. But when you’ve spent several minutes, even hours, toggling between them to glean on-page engagement insights, haven’t you wished to the analytics gods that there was a more efficient way to do your job?

We’re no deities, but we heard you. Hotjar’s alternative to this imperfect science isn’t a magic button, but another type of heatmap. Everybody, say hi to Engagement Zones. 👋

Here at Hotjar, we stand for an inclusive culture where our team members experience the psychological safety necessary to express themselves fully at work.

Guided by this principle, we have a long-standing tradition of celebrating Pride Month with initiatives proposed and curated by our internal LGBTQIA+ group.

The AI-powered research assistant that helps you find the insights you need.

We’ve acquired PingPong—a user testing and interviews platform—and we’re integrating it right into Hotjar.

Building a customer success program for the first time? Learn from Hotjar’s experiences to make your customer success program a winner.

Private sector companies of all sizes have a crucial role to play in fighting climate change. Here are 10 ways companies can do more to fight climate change now.

Emotional intelligence is a skill. Several skills, actually. Learn the five components of EQ, and take note of your strengths, and what you may need to work on.

From the behavioral study of animals (gorillas to be precise) to UX Design, Irene No shares her career path along with the 7 skills you need to start your career in UX Design.

Empathy is like any other skill that can be improved with practice. Here are seven ways to build empathy and improve your workplace communication.

While businesses have a larger role—and responsibility—in fighting climate change, the individual impact shouldn't be overlooked. After all, our personal choices do escalate to bigger results. What steps could you take now to generate less waste?

We don’t confuse perks with gimmicks. We prioritize home-office space, human connection, mental health, and personal time and growth. And we’ve got the budgets to prove it.

Behavioral change specialist Kevin Groen shares actionable steps for dealing with defensiveness in the workplace (and in personal life).

It’s important for everyone in society to know about LGBTQIA+ flags and basic expressions.

Between product activity and your proposed solution is a gap. Do you fill it with assumptions, opinions, and guesses? Here’s a better way to do it.

There are only 44 women CEOs in Fortune 500 companies. Here's why this is and how you can help get more women in leadership.

Learn more about why so many people fear giving and receiving feedback and how you can improve your own emotional intelligence for better workplace feedback.

We’re delighted to announce today that Contentsquare, Hotjar’s parent company, has raised $600 million in a Series F investment round.

We interviewed our People leaders, Sara Bent, Angela Buccitti, and Carol Veiga for a behind-the-scenes look at what makes our hiring experience unique for both recruiters and candidates.

Many businesses shy away from being open—to their detriment. Hotjar’s CEO, Mo, shares how and why the company maintains radical transparency as a core value.

Achieving accessibility in tech is tough for many reasons. Learn how Hotjar is rising to the challenge to build a more inclusive product and business.

Hotjar’s 2022 Pride Panel highlighted the immense diversity within the LGBTQIA+ community, shining a spotlight on asexuality and personal stories from around the globe.

'People first' is a new buzz phrase that’s catching on for many companies, but what does it mean? Hotjar’s CEO explains how to build a people-first company.

Profitable businesses don’t have to be exploitative. Here’s how Hotjar is working to prevent employee and consumer exploitation.

Business is about more than just profit. Here’s why conscious capitalism matters to us at Hotjar.

We can achieve the same or better results by doing less. This is probably surprising to most people, but that’s exactly what a zero-waste culture accomplishes. You’ve probably heard the term in relation to products and packaging. What does it mean in a company-wide context?

Do you feel safe speaking up in front of your team? You don’t build trust through team-building exercises and stated values. Here are 11 ways to build trust in teams. 

“You’re on mute." Three familiar words that rang throughout households across the globe, starting in March 2020. Three words acting as a metaphor for all the small, yet meaningful ways we’d have to adapt as we scrambled to function in our new remote world. 

Businesses aren’t exempt from doing what’s best for the planet—and that includes tech businesses that don’t have any physical products.

Do you or some of your team members turn their cameras off most of the time or stay quiet about new ideas? If your remote team has been struggling with collaboration, miscommunication, and decreased productivity, lack of trust could be a contributing factor.

Why don’t employees open up about burnout before it happens? Learn how to create a culture where it’s safe to talk about it. 

Ever felt like you weren’t good enough, like you were an imposter in your own job? Us, too. So let’s talk about it—along with ways to overcome those fraudulent feelings.

Do you know your company’s OKRs (objectives and key results) off the top of your head?

If you don’t know them, then your team likely doesn’t either. So it’s crucial that you do know what they are because OKRs are key to keeping teams aligned. 

What makes people invested in a company anymore?  Is it all about a higher salary? Remote work options?

What’s your first thought when you hear 'company values'?

Many of us are immediately skeptical. For the cynics, values = platitudes, corporate lip service, and that meaningless sign you point new joiners to, never to think about again.

We’re updating our pricing model to better align our pricing with the value that Hotjar provides. We don’t take changes like this lightly and transparency is one of our core values, so we’d like to share our thinking behind the update, and outline exactly what’s changing.

Does giving one-on-one feedback to your team members feel natural and comfortable? Or is it something you avoid or cringe about doing?

Business books on leadership often cite certain qualities that make a great leader, such as discipline, focus, determination, and perseverance. It feels like the stories of “great” leaders start with waking up at 5am, plunging into ice baths, or wearing the same style of outfit every day.

But in my experience, great leadership is not only about your daily routine but also about your willingness to connect with your team on a human level. In other words, to be vulnerable. 

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by all the tasks you have to complete, your jam-packed calendar or a looming deadline that you can’t seem to start—or that feeling like you can’t possibly do it all?

Who hasn’t, right? 

A few weeks ago, we put Megan Murphy, the VP of Product at Hotjar, on the spot to answer our users’ burning questions.

In these two videos, Megan covers everything from how to get strategy buy-in to handling loud voices in meetings to whether she’d abandon everything to open a bar on the beach.

So, despite it not being in our usual format for our Building in Public video series, whether you’re an experienced Product Manager or looking to start your product career, there’s something in here for you.

Today, we’re launching our new brand. As you’re reading this blog post, we’re guessing you’d have noticed on your own eventually—what with our new shiny logo, a blazing new set of colors, and a playful new typeface—but we wanted to share more about what’s happening and why.

In true Hotjar spirit and in line with one of our values, we’re building trust with transparency.

Would you believe that we managed to get every discipline equally excited about a single OKR? One that encouraged paying down some expensive tech debt, brought in some much-needed delight to a rather dull area of our product experience, and drove impressive business metrics—all at the same time?

How do you measure a product manager’s performance? And how do you make sure the criteria you’re using is setting them up for a successful and rewarding career?

At Hotjar, we believe competency frameworks should be empowering. They should help others give feedback, provide transparent guidance about the expectations of a PM's role, and clearly signpost how they can reach the next step in their career.

Hotjar and FullStory are two best-in-class behavior analytics platforms popular for analyzing website performance and user behavior. 

Both have similar tools and features but essential differences in their function. While FullStory aims to collect as much user data as possible, Hotjar’s combination of voice-of-the-customer (VoC) tools with heatmaps and recordings enables a more qualitative, people-centric approach to behavior analysis. 

Hotjar vs Google Analytics: it’s not an either/or (and why you should use both).

Hotjar and Mouseflow are best-in-class digital experience insights platforms, each providing users with a wealth of behavior analytics tools. Both platforms have similar functionality, but some crucial differences will affect which is right for you.

Hotjar vs Lucky Orange: which one should you choose?

If you’re in a product team (or just have a product-related hobby), we’ve got some exciting news for you. We’ve just launched the first episode of a new video series called Building in Public, where we share the secrets of how we build Hotjar—as we build Hotjar.

Watch the first episode—all about Hotjar’s product principles—right here:

"Today marks an important milestone in the history of Hotjar. On behalf of the Hotjar co-founders and team we are delighted to announce that Mohannad Ali, our Chief Product and Technology Officer, is taking on the role of CEO."

When Hotjar was founded in 2014, our co-founders intuitively embraced values like agility, lean operations, and ownership. As Hotjar grew, however, we realized that shaping these priorities into a transparent set of core values was key to aligning business objectives with the real-world challenges we faced.

Well-crafted values foster team unity, shape your customer’s brand perception, and steer decision-making. But how do you translate your company’s vision into a handful of values that are authentic and practical?

At Hotjar, we believe that success shouldn’t be measured in profits alone, but rather in the contributions we make to all stakeholders: our team, customers, end-users, partners, the community, and the planet.

This is why in 2017 we announced that Hotjar would begin pledging 1% of our revenue to ‘giving back’. We didn’t have a solid plan on how we’d give, but we knew we wanted to do it in a meaningful way.

As part of Hotjar's month-long celebration activities this Pride Month, we held an LGBTQIA+ panel for the team—exploring how to show up for and represent LGBTQIA+ people in the workplace.

If you’re serious about cooking, you don’t want a swiss army knife in your kitchen. You want a proper set of kitchen knives. The same principle applies to software tools, and how we’re thinking about building Hotjar.

Shopify is a leading ecommerce platform, boasting over 1 million stores worldwide. Opening a Shopify store may be simple enough, but consistently driving conversions and sales is a trickier task.

There’s no magic way to make your website better, but we do know of something that can set you on the right path: getting to know your users.

After reading this article, you’ll know exactly how to start using Hotjar’s user behavior and feedback analytics tools (think heat maps, session recordings, and surveys) to give your users what they need and increase conversions and sales for your Shopify-powered website.

Last year we wrote about how Hotjar went from idea to 60,000 beta signups in 6 months. As we inched closer to the end of the 6-month Hotjar beta phase, we had no idea what would happen once we started asking for payment.

We had just over €100,000 left in the bank after paying salaries for 9 months. I had worked as a consultant during this time, billing clients from the company and not taking a salary myself. I had planned to keep these funds available so we could weather a storm should Hotjar not take off.

Luckily, we were covering our operational costs within two months of stopping the beta. Having seen this result, we had the confidence to invest more personal funds into Hotjar and have a small treasure chest to build the team from. This allowed us to continue building on the success of our beta and ultimately reach €1 million in ARR in just 6 months.

Giving and receiving feedback is an essential ingredient for the long-term success of any organization… or any relationship for that matter. Companies are built on professional relationships, and the strongest relationships are built on effective communication.

I am Eric Robinson, Support Engineer at Hotjar, and I’d like to share my strategies for giving and receiving feedback in the healthiest, most productive way possible. I’ve seen these techniques work well here at Hotjar, and I hope they inspire you and your team to take your communication skills to the next level.

There are days when the simple act of getting stuff done requires a lot of effort. We’ve all been there: a deadline is looming, there are too many distractions, burnout is approaching fast. Sometimes, even finding the self-discipline to start work can be... a lot of work.

Back in June we had a team meet-up in Marbella, Spain, to work together in the same physical space for a few days and get to know each other ‘in real life’—we are fully remote the rest of the year! Between a glass of chilled gazpacho and an inflatable unicorn (true story), my colleagues and I shared our favorite techniques and routines to stay focused, organized, and productive. Here are some things that work for us: please let us know of any others that can help! 

Since being founded in 2014, Hotjar has been bootstrapped and profitable. To date, we’ve only reinvested into the business and no dividends have been paid out to shareholders. We’ve done this because we’re truly passionate about our vision, the work we do, and the people we do it for, and we believe that we’re building the foundations of a long-lasting business.

We’ve always believed in documenting our journey transparently, but it’s been almost two years since our last official company update, when we announced that we were investing €4 million into improving Hotjar and making it even better for you and your teams. Since then, we’ve had some successes, made some mistakes, and kept investing in the business—by the end of 2019, we’ll have added an additional €13 million on top of what we last announced. Today, I’m sharing an overview of how we did it, what this means for you, and what we’re doing next.

Wherever you are in the world, you may be experiencing remote work for the first time or getting ready to do so.

Here’s one prediction that has a 100% chance of coming true: throughout 2019 and 2020, a bunch of blogs will philosophize about ‘the future of work’ and what it means for humanity. Some will predict a workplace utopia, while others will paint a picture of doom, gloom, and job-killing robots.

To keep things interesting, we’ve chosen a different angle. Instead of exploring what the future of work might look like and labeling it good or bad, my colleagues and I have asked some innovative companies what they’re doing right now that’s ahead of its time.

The result? Practical, actionable advice to help you (and your company) succeed in the decades to come.

We’re extremely ambitious - our goal is to have Hotjar installed on 10 million sites. Having such a bold vision whilst taking a freemium approach presents huge technical challenges. How does an engineering team build a platform that can handle hundreds of millions of requests per day, knowing that most of that traffic comes from free users? Early on, we knew the key was to do things differently and focus on building a platform that could scale.

NOTE: This article was originally published in 2018.

When we founded Hotjar in 2014, we had an ambitious vision for our product, but we were also an unknown team of five with no external funding and little experience in the world of SaaS. We didn’t let any of that stop us: Hotjar went from idea to 60,000 beta signups in six months, and we hit an important milestone by going from beta to €1 million Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in the six months that followed. 

In this piece, I’m going to take you back to the period between late 2015 and mid-2016 when Hotjar tripled ARR from €1 to 3 million. Looking back from the vantage point of having grown past €15 million ARR, I can see that a lot of our current success and failures can be traced back to that time. That was the point when we realized we needed to create solid foundations for the growth we were experiencing, and take big, bold decisions to:  

Beeeeeep! Beeeeeep! That's the sound of your alarm going off. Beeeeeep! Beeeeeep!

Oh come on, one more minute! I need to sleep a bit more... I really don't want to go to work...

Have you ever felt this way before? Most certainly. There are always days when it's tougher to wake up than others.

Let me ask you another question: have you ever felt like this day after day?

Some Hotjar team members did, for months and even years, because they weren’t in the career of their dreams. The good news is that they managed to turn their careers around thanks to sheer persistence, tough decisions, and individual introspection.

These are their stories.

Working as part of a remote team comes with plenty of upsides.

We Hotjarians get to work from wherever we want, choose our own work schedules, and spend more time with friends and family. But remote work isn't always easy; for example, building a shared and inclusive culture with a distributed team takes a conscious effort.

Language plays a big part of that. Whether we realize it or not, our words can affect the people we care about, including those we work with. With team members from all over the planet, the way we address and talk to each other is important to make everybody feel included.

A few months back, we realized that a four-letter word we used a lot had the potential for making some team members feel excluded from the conversation—and this is the story of how we worked on gender-inclusive language at Hotjar and learned to say 'guys' less. 

Editor's note: this blog post is no longer being updated.

“Follow your passion!”

At some point in your life, you’ve undoubtedly heard someone say that all you need to do to succeed is to “follow your passion.”

While it’s true in some cases, it doesn't always (or often) translate into automatic success in the startup world. And, in many cases, following your passion can lead you straight into a failed business.

So, what’s the solution?

For starters, you need to stop thinking about what you enjoy, and instead - start thinking about your strengths and the opportunities around you.

Now, to be fair, I used to swear that the way to succeed was to follow your passion. I thought (like many do) that if you do something you're passionate about, it has to succeed because you’ll do it with love and conviction.

For decades, software developers have been using beta testers to get feedback on products ahead of their official release. For centuries before them, novelists and literary writers used beta readers to get opinions on late drafts before preparing manuscripts for publication. At Hotjar, we are not new to using beta testers for our software, but we only recently decided to learn a lesson from literature and apply a beta reader approach to our content.

As content makers, we want to invest time and effort into content initiatives that our target audiences will find helpful and enjoyable. To do that, we need ways to know that we have really empathized with our readers, instead of simply creating something we think they might enjoy. So here is the behind-the-scenes story of how and why we found 400+ beta readers who helped us write one of our most shared and read pieces of content, The Essential Guide to Growing Your Early-Stage SaaS Startup, and how that one experience has impacted on and changed our entire approach to content.

Hotjar was founded in 2014 with a bold vision to ‘Change the way digital experiences are built and improved by democratizing user analytics and feedback’. In less than three years, we went from running a 9-month beta program, to making Hotjar available to the public, to experiencing tremendous growth by finally reaching an Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) of €8 Million as of June 2017.

The transition to working from home can be difficult, particularly during a lockdown when you’re also sharing your new ‘office space’ with your partner and family members. For team leads, who are responsible not only for their own tasks, but also for managing and supporting team members, the transition can be even harder.

Building a killer app is not a simple feat and requires relentless focus on what’s important not only for driving business but making our users happy. Our focus is on what will help them achieve their goals and eradicate pain points - their success is ours. With a limited number of resources at hand, how do we build a product that keeps our users happy without getting carried away with projects and features that add very little value?

Making the right choice when deciding what to work on next is crucial. A bad decision now could have a huge impact on how quickly you are able to scale or pivot later on. At Hotjar we ask ourselves three simple questions when deciding what we want to focus on:

Dear Hotjar community,

Today, March 8th, we’re taking the opportunity to celebrate International Women’s Day together. As part of that celebration, we made a short video to shine a spotlight on the remarkable women who contribute to Hotjar’s success.

It's almost International Women's Day, and here at Hotjar's Content HQ it felt like a good time to celebrate the women who propel Hotjar forward all year round—the ones who write the code that makes our product work, the ones with their noses deep into financial spreadsheets and legal papers, the ones who answer your questions whenever you might need support, the ones who built the website you're on, and the ones who help our 100% distributed team grow.

Retrospectives are one of our favorite Agile practices. We find incredible value in the act of coming together to reflect on work we delivered after each sprint, share feedback to “determine what succeeded and what could be improved,” and agree on what high-priority action items to tackle next.

At Hotjar we don’t want to be just another company who claims they are ‘customer-centric’ without putting in any of the (hard) work required.

In our quest to learn from the best, we recently turned to Bill Macaitis (former marketing executive for Slack, Zendesk, and Salesforce) for inspiration and guidance on what he’s learned about customer-centricity throughout his career. After interviewing him on our podcast The Humans Strike Back and getting him to conduct a live Ask Me Anything (AMA) screencast on Facebook with us, we are now sharing some of his wisdom with you.

TL;DR: to Bill (and us) a necessary step in developing a ‘customer-centric’ business is “hir[ing] people smarter than you… [people who are] kind, courteous, generous, and have empathy.” In other words, customer-centricity begins with your internal customers: your team.

Here are a few examples of how it works.

Curious to know how things work at a fully remote company? I’m Ryan, Customer Success Manager at Hotjar, and I’ve been part of a remote team for almost two years. I’ve got plenty of insight to share!  

A few weeks back, I held a virtual meeting with more than 20 of my co-workers where we all talked about our experience, the perks, and the not-so-good parts of our life as remote workers. Let me take you behind the scenes…

I’m Marc von Brockdorff ,  co-founder and Director of Engineering at Hotjar. I have been building online products for the past 15 years and now spend most of my days planning the Hotjar product roadmap, interviewing candidates, and helping our product teams. In 2018 we reached a big milestone :  €15,000,000 in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), around three years after launching publicly in April 2015. Here are some things I learned throughout the process.

By the time my co-founders and I started Hotjar five years ago, we’d had enough experience to know that old-school approaches to business leadership—micro-management, lack of transparency, and so on—wouldn’t do anymore. We felt very passionate about the fact that work needed to better adapt to our lives, rather than our lives adapt to work.

Since then, we managed to lay the foundations of a company that has grown to 75+ team members and over €16 million in annual revenue in just a few years. I want to share what I’ve learned about effective leadership and its characteristics to help other teams out there change the way they approach business and create companies where people love to work. 

I recently stumbled upon a LinkedIn post from someone who’d just discovered a small but powerful piece of Hotjar functionality (rage clicks in Recordings). I was happy that the discovery will improve the amount of useful data this user can get out of the tool—but I also thought: “What if there are other people who don’t know about it?”

Dear Hotjar community,

We founded Hotjar back in 2014 with a mission to democratize user analytics and feedback. While a lot has changed since then, we’re proud that our product vision today still speaks to our mission: “to give businesses of all sizes the insights they need to create digital experiences their users love.”

We’re extremely excited to announce that Hotjar has joined forces with Contentsquare!

One of the best things about working remotely is the freedom to do your job from wherever you choose. But being part of a distributed team also comes with several challenges: for example, if you're new to the team and you can only meet your co-workers in person once or twice a year, it’s difficult to learn about interesting habits they may have outside of work, spot character-defining quirks, or even just get to know them as people.

As our fully remote team has grown past 100, we’ve made an effort to be intentional and proactive about building personal connections. Face-to-face interaction outside of a video call may be rare, but that doesn't stop our online team from getting to know one another. This blog post gives you a list of five of our favorite strategies for creating virtual spaces to socialize and hang out.

If you’ve ever followed through with something you thought was a great idea, only to see it fail, then this post is for you.

You see, earlier this year, we killed our mobile app.

It was a painful process. After all, we had invested over 3,500 developer hours and $200,000 into it.

But because of four key mistakes that we made, the app was doomed from the start.

In today’s post, I’ll be sharing with you what those exact mistakes were, as well as the six steps that we would take today to make sure those mistakes never happen again (10 lessons total).

It’s the story of how we failed to take an idea successfully to launch, all because we were focused on the wrong things.

Reading reviews from real, verified customers is one of the best ways to get an understanding of whether a tool is right for you or not.

I failed miserably in 2 startups before Hotjar. In both cases we built a product for months before we took it to market and started ‘selling’ it at scale. We thought that a well planned and complete user experience together with a top notch design were critical requirements before launch.

If I had a dollar for every time someone at Hotjar interrupts my day by asking “Hey, are you busy? Can you check something for me super-quick?”... I’d be pretty poor.

That’s because our team has been making an effort to protect our time and focus by improving the way we collaborate with each other—but it didn’t happen overnight, and we’re still very much learning. Today we want to share a few things we did recently that might help you and your teams, too.

The world has no shortage of intelligent, hard-working software engineers, but even the best ones will be limited by a culture that crushes innovation. So how can we encourage innovation and create cutting-edge products?

My name is Mohannad Ali, and I’m Hotjar’s new VP of Engineering. In this piece, I’m sharing the principles I believe world-class engineering teams should follow to grow and scale while creating products that customers love.

TL;DR: as Hotjar's CEO, I’m writing this article to talk openly about what we’ve learned around privacy, mistakes we’ve made, and how this is changing the way we are building Hotjar going forward.

Whatever your tech stack looks like, Hotjar can slot right in.

Keep reading for an overview of our range of integrations to get Hotjar up and running in your business—so you can start collecting user behavior insights wherever and however they’d be most useful.

With 17,385 users in Hotjar and only a small team to build and support the product, as well as run the company – we quickly realized we have to be smart and efficient in the way we communicate with our users. We're also obsessed about delivering great service.

So how do we deliver top-notch service with limited resources? Here is the setup we use:

Incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into your UX design helps you optimize your workflows and enhance your understanding of user needs, leading to better products, streamlined websites, and happier customers.

But as the use of AI increases, teams are faced with a complex challenge: how do you balance the precision and depth of AI insights without losing the personalized, human touch that defines exceptional UX design?

Six months have passed since launching our woman vs. machine content marketing experiment in June 2023, where we sent two competing content pieces out into the field to gather data. Keep reading to find out which piece resulted in more traffic, new visitors, signups, and positive sentiment.

Forget the science-fiction scenario where machines rule the world. In reality, we've got generative AI stepping in for something a little less ‘Black Mirror’ and a little more ‘The Office’: taking care of those mundane yet time-consuming tasks in the workplace. 

So, instead of relying on sci-fi for answers, let's dive into some down-to-earth, real-world examples.

Balancing artificial intelligence (AI) technology with the human touch during user interviews is more than just a best practice; it's essential for capturing qualitative and quantitative insights that help you develop successful products and continuously delight users. 

In an era increasingly shaped by data automation and machine learning, however, product teams face a complex challenge: how do you maintain the integrity of the interview experience, while also harnessing the depth and efficiency of AI?

More website visitors means more engagement and more sales, right? That equation is nearly perfect, except it’s missing a critical piece—user understanding. 

Instead of focusing on how to increase website traffic at any cost, aim for qualified traffic. That is, attracting visitors who fit your target audience.

Market gaps are customer needs that are currently unfulfilled or underserved by existing services or products. Pinpointing these untapped opportunities offers businesses a wealth of advantages: from boosting revenue and expanding their customer base, to enhancing user satisfaction and standing out from the competition.

But how do you identify—and evaluate—these market gaps, while still balancing business goals and customer needs?

Hotjar’s Content team has spent the last few months familiarizing ourselves with the new wave of terrifyingly advanced AI-powered tools, wondering: can they actually do what we do? As editors, writers, content creators, and SEO specialists, we naturally hope the answer is no. But we’ve also seen proof enough that, with the right prompt, tools like ChatGPT and Jasper produce well-written, information-rich content that correctly follows a brief in minutes. 

In the rapidly evolving landscape of technology, AI’s profound impact is increasingly evident across various industries. 

From retail and ecommerce to technology and IT, as well as marketing and advertising, AI has ushered in a new era: revolutionizing business operations, customer engagement, and strategic optimization—and ultimately reshaping the way organizations operate and thrive in the digital age.

Remember ChatGPT’s explosive debut in late 2022? Since then, within a matter of months, artificial intelligence (AI) has astonished the world with brand-new, advanced applications that could upend life and work as we know them. 

It’s perfectly fine to have mixed feelings about all this—we still do! But we’re sure you didn’t just come here for a pep talk. So, here’s a prompt, if you will:

Say goodbye to the janky chatbots of yore, and imagine what you and your customers could achieve with AI as it is now: a multipurpose technology with tremendous practical capabilities. Getting to grips with the new generation of AI in its early days is the fastest way to understand its impact on your business and broader industry. 

Whether you're looking for a casual side hustle or a full-time career, monetizing your skills to make money online leads to new business opportunities, a sustainable income stream, and personal fulfillment—all from the comfort of your home.

With so many different opportunities available, however, it can feel overwhelming to know how and where to start.

Recently a group of us in engineering discussed how different people think about and define 'work', and how connected (or disconnected) this is to sitting at a desk. 

We found that while some colleagues felt comfortable 'working' away from their desks, others did not—and some folks even felt guilty if they didn’t get eight hours in at their desks.

Here we share some learnings, advice, and quotes to help others feel more comfortable working away from their desks.

We’ve opened up about workplace mental health. From psychological safety and burnout to mental rest days and perks aimed at your well-being. No new-age woo-woo here. Just practical tips and useful insights from our team that you and your team can try right away.

Big workloads aren't the only stressor in the workplace. Learn how Hotjar creates an unflappable work environment that addresses the most common stresses.

Difficult conversations are, well, difficult. But with the right preparation and perspective, they can be a little bit easier. Here are some tips from Dr. Hayley Lewis.

Remote work doesn't have to be isolating. Learn how Laura Wong, a Growth Product Manager at Hotjar, has started using anxiety parties as a tool to increase team trust and collaboration.

Are you ready to give feedback? Before you do, check your mindset, motivations, and hidden biases that could derail your message.

People have different opinions about remote work. But what’s actually true, and what’s unjustified legend? Here’s the truth about common remote work myths.

If you want to get real work done—and have a personal life—you have to set boundaries to protect your time and attention. Here are five ways to do it. 

What exactly are microaggressions? And why are they important to know about and address in the workplace?

We’ve scraped our own barrel of self-doubting inner-monologues, and it was painful. So we’ve added some tips to respond to the doubts. 

Building teams with divergent thought processes, thinking styles, and problem-solving approaches are also increasingly recognized as critical to success. This kind of variation is referred to as cognitive diversity. Here are 10 ways to help you rethink diversity at work.

Building community and connections in a remote company doesn’t have to be challenging. Here’s how Hotjar builds lasting connections and a well-loved company culture.

Too many unproductive meetings? We’ve rounded up 8 common remote meeting pitfalls—along with 8 tips for designing meetings worth attending.

Scheduling a meeting? Wait! Before you do, make sure it’s a meeting that people will be happy to attend. Here’s a better-meeting checklist to help.

Annual team meetups are how we get to know each other in real life, have fun, work together, and share ideas. Get an inside look at what it takes to plan and execute a four-day meetup for 200+ people.

Coaching employees promoted to leadership roles is a vital way to build stronger companies. Learn how Hotjar uses leadership coaching to help teams succeed.

Can mindfulness really help reduce stress and improve attention? Yes. And it's easier than you think to get started with some simple practices at work. Here's how.

Feel like you never have time to get it all done? Maybe you need to take a break. Here’s how to unlock deep work time by prioritizing deep downtime.

Meetings have a bad rap for being unnecessary or overused. Hotjar CEO, Mohannad, shares his tips for running productive meetings on a remote team.

We believe empathy and business go hand in hand. Hotjar’s CEO, Mohannad Ali, shares how leaders can motivate employees and grow revenue by being more empathetic. 

When was the last time you took a mental health day? If your answer is never, find out why you should. And if you’re not sure how, or when, to take a day for yourself, we’ve got that covered, too.

Hotjar COO Ken Weary on his approach to minimalism, and how he practices and benefits from minimalism at work.

Remote work is here to stay. Getting it right depends on your processes, tools, and intentions. Learn how Hotjar made remote work work for its 250-person team. 

Some top-down decisions are unavoidable and necessary. But if most decisions are only made by your team leads, this will weaken team morale and increase biased decision making.

Passion projects are more important than ever. We believe in nurturing our team’s passion projects outside of work. Here’s how we do it.

The new year is well underway. And by this time, many people’s New Year’s resolutions are well out of mind. 

But we don’t want that to happen to you. So we put together a list of 10 New Year’s resolutions web-olutions to help you stay tuned into the goals you’ve set for yourself, and the goals you may have forgotten to put on your list. 

Prioritizing product roadmaps, building trust with your team, and overcoming the biggest and baddest product obstacles. This, plus plenty more. 

So grab your notebook and let’s make sure this year counts.

Why do you work where you do? What made you want to work there? And now that you’re there, why do you decide to stay?

We sat down with Kristina Maleeva, our Sales team Lead for the Americas, to find out why Hotjar is where she calls home. We learned a lot about what makes Hotjar’s Sales culture unique, some company perks that you don’t hear every day, and an approach to remote work that actually works.

How much time do you spend a week in recurring meetings? How many of those are actually useful to you? If you’re like most product teams, I’m sure you’ve got your remote rituals pretty much nailed by now. Right? Sure.

At Hotjar, we’ve been doing this fully remote work thing since 2014. Yes, way before the pandemic hit. And to be honest, we still haven’t nailed it. But we have learned some things along the way that have helped.

Are you using the best tools for your job? It’s a trick question. Because there’s rarely a hands-down best tool for any job. What matters is that you find the ones that work for you and your team. 

As part of a product team, you design and build products that customers love. How do you do that? By putting the customer first, and translating their needs into your product. So you need ways to interact with customers, gather all the research you’ve done, prototype and design solutions, and to keep track of progress along the way.

Hotjar was always going to be a remote company, long before the coronavirus pandemic. In 2014, when Hotjar began, our three founders all lived in Malta, yet they didn’t know how long they’d be there and where life would take them next.

So, they set out to create a remote company, and what better way to practice than by working from different corners of the island? It could’ve been easy to have a Meetup and work alongside each other, but David, Marc, and Jonathan started as they meant to go on.

Now, a few years and over 100 employees later, and in the spirit of one of our values—build trust with transparency—we’re ready to share some tips with the world. We asked Hotjarians about their experiences of working remotely and we’ve summarized them below.

A record number of people are leaving their jobs. It’s a phenomenon being called ‘The Great Resignation’, where more workers are planning to leave their jobs than ever before.

Some are pointing to the slow move to flexible or remote working as the main culprit. While on the other hand, some businesses have ignored this entirely and adopted the tactic of moving everyone right back into the office and returning to business as usual. (As a remote business, we don’t comply with this!)

Nevertheless, businesses are currently experiencing an exodus of talent. And on top of that, they’re having just as much trouble filling those empty seats.

If you’re part of a remote or distributed team, you may have noticed the productivity boosts you gain by working asynchronously. But moving your business forward has to happen while your team stays firmly focused and aligned on what matters most: your customers.

At Hotjar, we firmly believe that the user always comes first. Online startups can no longer get away with offering a mediocre product or a sub-par customer experience. Users expect a great user experience and responsive, quick customer support and the companies that will succeed are those who can provide exactly that.

We’ve been fortunate at Hotjar that we were already fully remote pre-pandemic, but we’ve still felt the covid-sting. For one thing, it’s become pretty clear how much we depend on our company meetups to maintain the culture we know and love.

Conferences are great. You get to meet people, learn stuff, not be at work for the day. Joyful.

But let’s be honest: most conferences you go to end up with the two best talks scheduled to clash, then three hours of killing time until the next good one.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could pick and choose which talks happen, and when?

In June 2016 the Hotjar team flew in from all over the world to spend a week together on the gorgeous island of Malta (click here in case you’re wondering where it is).

If your team has suddenly found itself transitioning from working in an office to working at home, you’re likely facing many unexpected challenges. One of them is what to do with your new team members—how do you welcome and onboard a new team member when your company is remote?

I’m Sara, the People Ops Specialist with Hotjar. I’ve been working here for three and a half years and have amassed a lot of experience with onboarding team members remotely. We are continuously making improvements to our processes, but hopefully the lessons we’ve learned so far can help you face these challenges with your newly-remote team.

Back in February, we launched the XAwards for early-stage startups (2 to 5 members) to discover some of the world’s most innovative and exciting teams, and learn about the products and services they are building. We also wanted to give back to the startup community with three XAwards cash prizes: €20,000 for Best Overall Experience, €5,000 for Best Tech Achievement and €5,000 for Best Mobile App Experience.

We selected 10 finalists from 640 entries and invited them to Malta (where Hotjar is headquartered) on May 11th to pitch their projects to our judging panel; we later extended the invite to an additional 8 teams who had impressed us. And because we knew this would be a great networking and learning opportunity for everyone, including Hotjar's remote team, we also decided to organize a 2-day event with international guest speakers from companies such as Basecamp, Pipedrive, PriceIntelligently, Receptive and SaaStock.

No one likes to wait. Even at a nice restaurant, if the food takes too long to arrive, you’ll start wriggling on your chair and looking around for the waiter. Worst case, you might even leave. 

This is nothing new: people are impatient by nature, and your users are no different. If you ask them to wait too long for their requested content, they’ll enjoy the experience less and eventually drop off.

Observability is not a new concept in the software industry, but it still amazes me how many different interpretations I hear about this term. In many cases, observability ownership appears ambiguous, and it's also common to see it treated as an afterthought.

At Hotjar, our Engineering team often gets questions from candidates in the hiring process about how we function internally. Questions like these tend to come up after a candidate’s technical interview, when we may have run out of time to discuss them in depth. We know this information is useful for candidates, and we can’t always address these questions as fully as we’d like. So, we’re sharing our responses here.

Lazy loading or loading content on demand is the process of identifying resources that are non-blocking to a website and delaying their loading or initialization until the page needs them.

As software engineers, we pursue high-quality solutions against a ticking clock. But spending too much time perfecting solutions before delivery delays the result and increases the cost of adapting these solutions to new learnings. What’s more, the approach of grinding to the finish line is not sustainable.

In JavaScript, 'let' and 'const' bindings have a property called Temporal Dead Zone (TDZ). It’s a deadly trap indeed, and often not easy to spot. I learned this the hard way while working on JavaScript bundle optimization at Hotjar.