Heatmap snapshots
Why a heatmap has no screenshot: login walls, slow pages, redirects, private hosts, and how retaking works.
A heatmap is two things: the clicks and scroll depth we collect from real visitors, and a screenshot of the page to draw them on. The clicks are collected the moment you add the page. The screenshot is taken separately, by a real browser opening your page, and that is the part that can fail.
Note. A failed snapshot never loses data. Clicks keep being collected while the screenshot is missing, and they appear as soon as a retake succeeds.
“The snapshot could not be captured”
The page is fetched over HTTPS at your site’s own domain, with no sign-in and a twenty-second budget. The usual causes:
| Cause | What to do |
|---|---|
| The page is behind a login | The browser has no session and cannot sign in. Capture a public page instead, or make a public version of the layout you want to measure. |
| The page blocks automated browsers | Bot protection or a challenge page stops the capture, or captures the challenge instead of your page. Allow the capture, or pick a page without the protection. |
| The page takes too long | The capture gives up after twenty seconds. Check the page in a cold browser with no cache. |
| The page redirects away from HTTPS | A redirect to http fails the capture. Serve the page over HTTPS. |
| The site is not publicly reachable | Staging on a private address or an internal hostname can never be captured. Point the heatmap at a public page. |
| The page is very tall | Pages beyond roughly 16,000 pixels are clipped rather than failing. Consider measuring a shorter page. |
Fix the cause, then press Retake. Captures run one at a time, so a retake can sit in a queue for a minute before anything happens.
The path was refused
A heatmap path is a path on your own site, not a URL. It must start with /, be at most 512 characters, and contain no query string or fragment. The host it resolves to must be the site’s domain or one of its extra domains.
It says it is still capturing
“Capturing the snapshot” normally clears within a minute. If it does not, check back after a few minutes: one browser handles every capture, so a busy moment delays the queue rather than failing it.
Snapshots turned off on this server
A self-hosted install without Chromium installed for Playwright shows a banner saying page snapshots are turned off, and new pages and retakes are refused. Existing heatmaps still collect clicks. An administrator needs to install Chromium on the API host; this never happens on the hosted service.
Plan limits
Each plan includes a number of heatmap pages per site. Adding one past that says so and offers to remove a page or move up a plan. During a trial everything is available; once a trial has ended, heatmaps become read-only along with the rest of the dashboard.
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