How to find, monitor, and solve website issues without technical knowledge

This guide shows you how to use tools to find, monitor, and solve website issues without technical knowledge. Use these insights to create better user experiences and improve your campaigns’ success.

How to find issues when launching something new

Launching something new or rolling out updates introduces plenty of opportunity for error. Here are some things to consider before and after sending changes live to make sure everything works as it should. 

Before launch

Before you press ‘publish’, run the following manual and automated tests to ensure your website's technical and UX aspects are up to scratch.

Perform cross-browser testing

Testing your new site page(s) across multiple browsers and devices to see how they render and perform at different resolutions helps you spot design and usability problems before they affect real users.

Tools like BrowserStack make it easy to simulate different browser environments and interact with your site on each to make sure everything looks correct before launch.

Test your site on real or target users

Getting real or target users to navigate and review your new designs before they go live gives you the chance to spot problems and address user concerns or confusion before they affect your brand’s reputation. 

For example, you could test if a logo redesign resonates with your target buyers in the way you anticipate, or verify if a new landing page design is as easy to navigate as you think.

You can do this by

• Running concept tests like card sorting, tree testing, and surveys to get feedback on new logos, messaging, or designs before going live

• Running moderated user interviews with a tool like Hotjar Engage to see how people navigate your design in real time and ask follow-up questions

After launch

Once your redesign or update has gone live, it’s time to double-check everything works as intended. 

Check tracking scripts are working

Making website changes can easily lead to accidental broken or missing tracking scripts. Check that all your marketing analytics tools are tracking your pages correctly to avoid missing data in your reports. 

If you’re using Hotjar, look in your Account settings under Sites & Organizations to make sure that your tracking code is collecting data:

Watch real user interactions early on

Every user on your site is unique, and even the most diligent pre-launch tests can’t guarantee a 100% error-free website. That’s why session recordings are so useful: they recreate real user browsing sessions across multiple pages. You’ll see first-hand every time a user gets stuck, bounces away, or encounters a bug. 

Use a session recording tool like Hotjar Recordings to view real user behavior on your site early on in the roll-out to get ahead of any website bugs that may appear.

How to continually monitor your website for bugs 

Even if you’re not launching something new, your website is a living document, and new problems can pop up anytime and where you least expect them. 

While you can’t control external forces, you can continually monitor your website for bugs to uncover issues and prioritize fixes when you spot something that’s not right.

Check for technical errors

‘Invisible’ issues like slow-loading or non-indexable pages are difficult to spot, even if you spend all day looking at the front end of your website. 

There are plenty of tools (many of which are free) you can use to monitor for and spot technical errors that might be holding you back. Give these a try:

• Google Search Console to identify issues with site speed and search engine crawling

• GTmetrix to monitor website speed 

• Ahrefs’ site audit tool to find on-page SEO issues like broken links

If you’re using Hotjar Recordings, filter by ‘error’ to save time and skip straight to recordings of users who experienced a JavaScript error on your site.

When you view a recording, you’ll see a red error icon when errors occur—click to view the error console and see more details.

You can also monitor errors in Hotjar over time by creating an error chart in Hotjar Trends—add the error widget to your Hotjar Dashboard to spot an uptick in errors before they cause problems.

Investigate website dropoffs

Identifying where (and, more importantly, why) people leave your website will reveal any UX issues that need to be fixed to improve conversions. 

You can start this process with a traditional analytics tool like Google Analytics—look for pages with a high bounce rate, exit rate (exits divided by pageviews), and low engagement rate. 

You can also look at your marketing funnels in a tool like Hotjar Funnels to quickly identify dropoffs for further investigation and use funnel analysis to identify issues and boost conversions.

Once you’ve identified your problem pages, investigate why they’re not performing by clicking the play icon to watch related session recordings.

Review rage clicks

Rage clicks represent where users click repeatedly on a website element in a short period of time. They usually indicate something’s wrong, like broken links or buttons, false links (i.e. an unlinked asset a user thinks is a link), or slow-loading elements. 

Reviewing where users rage click helps you see your designs from their perspective and figure out what might need fixing or improving.

If you’re using Hotjar Heatmaps, filter any heatmap by rage click to view a rage click map. Click any rage click icon on your heatmap to show the play icon—click this to view session recordings filtered by rage click on that same element:

Collect real-time feedback

Giving visitors a way to leave real-time feedback on your website makes it easier for them to report issues or questions they have instead of needing to open a support ticket or send an email. 

We use our own tool, Hotjar Feedback, to do this across our website and in the product. Any visitor or logged-in customer can rate their experience, tag a page element, and leave a comment.

Set up alerts

Remembering to log into individual tools to check for errors can be a hassle (or get forgotten). Setting up alerts will ensure you always know when something’s broken and can quickly react.

If you’re using Hotjar, create a recording segment for sessions that include errors or rage clicks and use the Slack integration to get Slack alerts about new matching recordings sent to a channel of your choice.

By the way, most of the tools we mention in this guide can also be configured to send you email alerts when new issues are found.

How to solve website issues 

Unless you’re a team of one, you’ll likely need to loop in another department or team member to fix some of the issues you found using the above techniques. The remaining tips and tools will help you organize, communicate, and get buy-in for fixes quickly. 

Highlight and tag critical issues

Instead of trying to explain or recreate technical or UX issues for your devs, show them the real thing. Seeing first-hand how a real problem affects users helps you clarify the issue more than a wordy message does, and also builds empathy and motivates your team to prioritize UX in future updates. 

If you’re using Hotjar Recordings, click to create a ‘highlight’ from part of any recording, add it to a collection, tag it with an icon (the ladybug is for bugs!), and add a comment for context.

Share errors with your team

Sharing bugs and website errors with your team has two benefits:

• It makes it easier (and quicker) for people to fix a bug by seeing it in action

• It helps everyone on the team build user empathy and better customer experiences into future updates

If you’re using Hotjar, review your bug recording collection in Hotjar Highlights and share a link with your team.

You can also click to create a Jira issue from any error you find in a session recording or feedback response.

Fewer errors, happier customers

Whatever your marketing goals are, your efforts will be helped by reducing the number of bugs, errors, and downright confusing elements across your website. One of the simplest, no-code ways to do this is to bake behavior analytics into your marketing workflow and get into the habit of testing designs before launch, monitoring for bugs year-round, and looping in your team to prioritize the fixes you know will make a difference. 

And you can achieve all that with the different tools in Hotjar—start for free and scale as you grow.