Posted in Cool Tool

Monday Morning Cool Tool: Hotjar

This week I’m recommending Hotjar, a website optimization tool.

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Imagine being able to see your website through your visitors’ eyes. Tools like heatmaps, scroll maps, and click maps make this a reality. Heatmaps highlight the most engaged areas of your pages, showing you where visitors instinctively click or tap. Scroll maps show how far down the page visitors typically venture, indicating if crucial content is being missed. Click maps pinpoint exactly where users are trying (and sometimes failing) to interact. This visual feedback provides an immediate understanding of user attention and potential points of confusion.

Going beyond static snapshots, visitor recordings offer a dynamic view of individual user sessions. By watching recordings of clicks, taps, and mouse movements, you can witness firsthand the user experience. This allows you to identify usability issues that might not be apparent from aggregated data. Perhaps a button is unclear, a form field is causing hesitation, or a navigation element is proving difficult to locate. These real-time journeys can uncover hidden frustrations and highlight areas needing immediate attention.

Platforms like Hotjar cleverly combine these powerful Analysis tools with Feedback tools, offering a holistic view of the user experience. This synergy provides the “big picture” – not just what users are doing, but also their direct opinions and frustrations. By understanding both the “what” and the “why,” you gain the knowledge necessary to make data-driven decisions that enhance your site’s usability, improve performance, and ultimately drive higher conversion rates.

Price: Hotjar offers a tiered pricing structure (including a free tier with limitations) with different plans based on your needs and the volume of website traffic and usage.

Posted in Cool Tool

Monday Morning Cool Tool: GTmetrix

I love learning about new tools to make social media marketing more creative and effective, so I’ve decided to share some of my favorite tools with you at the start of each week. This week I’m recommending website speed test tool –  GTmetrix.

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GTmetrix has a suite of features and options to make optimizing your website clear and easy. It gives you insight on how well your site loads and provides actionable recommendations on how to optimize it. You can also use the tool to analyze the page load of your site from 28 servers in 7 different regions around the world.

How fast your website loads is critical – a good site will load in 2 seconds. Research shows that a single second delay in site load time can reduce your conversions by 7 percent. If your site is taking longer than that, consider that around 40% of people will leave a website if it doesn’t load in 3 seconds.

The faster your site, the better. Google announced back in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches too.

Visit https://gtmetrix.com to try out this tool’s features.