New WordPress plugin: WP-Clickmap

Yesterday, over at css-tricks.com,  Chris published an article by Jay Salvat about using PHP and jQuery to create a clickmap on your site. I started playing with that idea and decided to make it into a wordpress plugin.

A couple hours of coding, and several versions later, I happily finished WP-Clickmap v1.0

This little plugin will store each click made on pages of your site in a database, and from there, you’ll be able to go to your blog’s admin section and view the various pages. See what is popular with your visitors and what’s not. It’s had some interesting results on the sites I’ve run it on so far, and wanted to share it here for people to download and play around with.

Download wp-clickmap.zip

For anyone who is wondering about the advantages of clickmaps, clickmaps let you see your site from a usability perspective. Your clickmaps show literally every click a user makes on a particular page. Every click is loaded into the database and over time a visual representation of collective clicks gives you an overview of the hotspots on the page.

While it is interesting to see links that are being clicked on, it is even more valuable to see where people are that are not links. Why do people keep clicking on the middle of my page?

WP-clickmap is based on the original idea Jay Salvat published on his blog and on css-tricks.com. Thanks to Jay and Chris for the idea.

45 Responses to “New WordPress plugin: WP-Clickmap”

  1. Gotta be fast! I was just about to turn it into a WordPress plugin myself but thought I better check there wasn’t something already like it – but I’m too slow.

    I’ll give it a whirl sometime soon.

    As for your question, I tend to absently click the text I’m reading…

  2. Rob MacKay says:

    Thanks so much for this! I was looking at turning it into a WP plugin myself – but it would have taken me a wee bit longer :D

  3. Surfkultura says:

    Thank you very much for this release Roger! I just installed it and it is just gourgeous useful!
    At first the dots highlighting the “twilight zones” didn´t appear but i just looked again after a while and you can infere a lot of things out of this.

    Many thanks,
    Sk

  4. muzo says:

    this is awesome. i just set it up on three of my blogs. i’ll hit you back if i run into anything weird. thanks..

  5. Tanner Hobin says:

    Thats just awesome! Thanks for turning it into a WP plugin.

  6. Very cool plugin.. I have been using CrazyEgg for usability testing but like this idea of having it baked into WordPress. thanks for a killer plugin!

  7. by the way… which tweetback plugin are you using?

  8. wow its like the whole world is just doing wordpress now http://www.rogerstringer.com/projects/wpclickmap WP_clickmap

  9. RT @ilovetypography: clickmap (heatmap) WP plugin: http://tinyurl.com/8sj89g – pretty cool

  10. New Wordpress plugin that overlays a click map to analyze user behavior http://tinyurl.com/8sj89g

  11. hehe.. here is the link for the WP Tracking http://bit.ly/jy5r

  12. RT @TannerHobin New Wordpress plugin that overlays a click map to analyze user behavior http://tinyurl.com/8sj89g

  13. [...] Stringer turned the clickmap demo from yesterday into a WordPress plugin. All you do is activate it and it starts saving clicks from all the different pages on your site. [...]

  14. [...] New WordPress plugin: WP-Clickmap | Roger Stringer’s Blog [...]

  15. I am waaaaaaaaaaaaaay toooooooooooooooooooooooo sssssssssllllllllloooooowwwwwwwww.

    I thought of the Wordpress plugin idea, too. Well, at least I learned about how to make a custom plugin. Thanks!

  16. viktor says:

    great plugin! :)

    in which versions of wp does it works?

  17. [...] Stringer turned the clickmap demo from yesterday into a WordPress plugin. All you do is activate it and it starts saving clicks from all the different pages on your site. [...]

  18. Tom Hermans says:

    Great idea, great turnout !

    I saw the clickmap-things at work and thought about building one, and now i don’t even have to do that. Works like a charm !

    Thanx & greetz,
    ToM.

  19. Great plug-in!

    I’m all about visual statistics and this is a great way to view whats “hot”

    Way to go.

  20. This is incredible, thanks!

  21. [...] This little plugin will store each click made on pages of your site in a database, and from there, you’ll be able to go to your blog’s admin section and view the various pages. See what is popular with your visitors and what’s not. It’s had some interesting results on the sites he had run it on so far, and wanted to share it for people to download and play around with, said Roger Stinger. [...]

  22. Rogerio says:

    Thank’s, nice pluggin.

  23. Very nice plug-in, I have installed and activated it on a few blogs, and very very useful “visual stat” tool. I’m sure this will help alot of us determine exactly where our visitors are clicking, it’s going to be great to monetize those stray clicks! Thanks Roger.

  24. Otto Rask says:

    Will this exclude the clicks the admin does by him-/herself? Would make some distortion to the data, especially during testing sessions and so on. :)

    • Roger Stringer says:

      Open up wp-click.php, find line 44, and edit:

      if (!is_admin()){

      to say

      if (!is_admin() && !current_user_can(‘level_10′)){

      That will exclude clicks from admin user :)

  25. [...] – Klickvisualisierungs Plugin für #WordPress http://www.rogerstringer.com/projects/wpclickmap » Post a comment — Trackback URI RSS 2.0 feed for these comments This entry [...]

  26. [...] written on 13 Jul 2009 under journal I started gaining an interest in my audience on this blog. I read more about blogging and all that nonsense, came across some Tim Ferriss video on blogging (I can’t remember for the life of me where I found it). Anyway, he used crazyegg to find out where his visitors were clicking. I have absolutely no reason to pay for this service, so I went about looking for an alternative. That’s when I came across this wonderful plugin called WP-Clickmap. [...]

  27. Denny says:

    Wow…that was simple to install! Very well made plugin!

  28. Mike says:

    Wow, Great plugin and it really works ! Thanks ! :) )

  29. @rdjfraser says:

    Thanks for making this, I love the web and checking to see if there are things I wish for. Glad there are awesome code monkeys like yourself making the world a better place!

    Thanks,
    Rob

  30. gosh dang this is cool.

  31. [...] WP-Clickmap is a simple and extremely useful tool and Wordpress Plugin to help you understand the click-patterns of your users so that you can better enhance the user experience. [...]

  32. Just what I was after! cheers mate.

  33. dan says:

    Wow! Great plugin! Thank you Roger!

Leave a Reply

Back to Top