Your heatmap has a bright patch around a product image and hardly any clicks on the main button. What should you change?
Making the button bigger is one possibility. Making the image clickable is another. Neither is a conclusion you can draw from the colors alone.
To use website heatmaps to improve conversions, turn a pattern into a question, choose a focused fix, and measure what happens after it. Here is a workflow you can repeat on a landing page, product page, or enquiry form.
1. Pick one page and define success
Start with a page that matters to the customer journey and receives enough relevant traffic to investigate. Avoid reviewing every page at once.
Write down the action you want visitors to complete. For a service business, that might be a successfully submitted enquiry. For a shop, it might be a completed order. Clicking “Submit” or “Buy” is an intermediate action, not proof that either happened.
Check that your reporting captures the completed action correctly before changing the page. Record the page version, review dates, traffic sources, and device mix. You will need that context when you compare results.
2. Find friction, then check your explanation
If you need help interpreting the colors, start with our guide to reading a heatmap. Here, the question is what to do with the pattern.
Look for a mismatch between the action you intended and the clicks you observed:
- An important button gets few clicks. Is its purpose clear? Does it work on a phone?
- A decorative image attracts clicks. Does it look like a link to product details?
- Visitors choose secondary links instead of the main action. Are they looking for information the page leaves unanswered?
Treat these as possible explanations. Few clicks do not establish that nobody saw a button, and clicks on an image do not establish frustration.
Open the page on the affected device and follow the journey yourself. Check the destination, form validation, and confirmation step. Compare the pattern with visitor paths and traffic sources. A campaign sending the wrong audience needs a different response from a broken button.
3. Prioritize by reach, evidence, and effort
Keep a short list of findings. For each one, record the affected page and audience, the observed behavior, your explanation, and a possible fix.
Then ask three questions. How many relevant visits could this affect? How strong is the evidence that it blocks the intended action? How much work and risk does the fix involve?
A reproducible mobile form error deserves attention before a speculative color change. A widely used product page may be a better starting point than a rarely visited page with a dramatic-looking heatmap.
If the evidence is thin, investigate further. Do not turn one unusual visit into a redesign brief or assume that a small sample rules out a problem.
4. Make one change you can explain
Imagine a fictional ceramics shop. Visitors repeatedly click a product photo, while the nearby “More” link receives little activity. The photo does nothing; the link opens the product details.
A useful hypothesis is: “Visitors expect the photo to open product details. Making it a link to the same destination will help them continue.”
That suggests a bounded change: make the photo an accessible link with a clear purpose. Keep the price, surrounding copy, and checkout unchanged so the result is easier to interpret.
Other findings need different fixes. An unclear CTA may need a specific label. A competing banner may need less prominence. Missing delivery information may belong beside the purchase decision. Match the change to the explanation you are testing.
Before release, check the revised journey on desktop and phone, including keyboard access and the completed action. Keep a copy of the previous version.
5. Test the outcome, not just the hotter button
Choose your main measure before the test. For an enquiry page, that could be the percentage of eligible visits with a successful submission, counting each visit once. Keep the definition consistent across versions.
Where you have enough traffic, use a separate experimentation tool or implementation to assign comparable visitors randomly to the original and revised pages. Set the sample requirement and analysis plan in advance; do not stop at the first encouraging result.
With less traffic, a before-and-after comparison can guide your next decision. Record changes in campaigns, devices, seasonality, and tracking. Those differences limit what you can attribute to the edit.
Reopen the heatmap to check whether behavior changed, then check completed outcomes. More product-detail clicks with no improvement in completed purchases is a reason to investigate the next step, not declare a conversion win.
Put the workflow into practice
Hitsteps click heatmaps and page analysis let you review click patterns alongside visitor sources and journeys. Heatmaps start on Growth and above. The workflow does not depend on session recording, and Hitsteps does not run the randomized experiment described above for you.
To explore the visitor context behind a finding, open the no-signup Godview demo. It uses example data from a made-up shop, so you can look around before connecting your own website.
