Free heatmaps and session replay with Microsoft Clarity
Add Microsoft Clarity to your blog in two minutes and start watching exactly how visitors scroll, click, and navigate — at no cost.
Microsoft Clarity is a free behaviour analytics tool that shows you heatmaps (where visitors click and how far they scroll) and session recordings (full video replays of real visits). It's genuinely free — no usage caps, no paid tiers — and it takes about two minutes to connect to your VeloCMS blog.
Creating a Clarity project
If you don't have a Clarity account yet, sign up at clarity.microsoft.com with a Microsoft or Google account. Once in, click New Project, give it a name (your blog name works fine), and enter your blog URL. Clarity generates a Project ID — a short alphanumeric string that looks something like "abcd1234ef". Copy it; you'll paste it into VeloCMS in the next step.
Connecting Clarity to VeloCMS
In your VeloCMS admin, go to Admin → Plugins → Microsoft Clarity and install the plugin. The settings panel has a single field: Project ID. Paste in the ID you copied from Clarity and save. That's it. The Clarity tracking snippet is injected into all public blog pages automatically — you don't need to touch any code.
Clarity data usually starts appearing within a few minutes of the first visit after you save. If you don't see data after 24 hours, verify the Project ID is correct and check that you're looking at the right date range in the Clarity dashboard.
What Clarity shows you
Inside Clarity you get three main views. Heatmaps show you aggregate click and scroll patterns across a page — useful for seeing whether readers actually reach your CTA or bail halfway down. Session recordings let you watch individual visits play back in real time, including mouse movement, scrolls, and clicks. The Dashboard gives you headline numbers: dead clicks (clicking something that isn't interactive), rage clicks (rapid repeated taps on something that isn't responding), and scroll depth distribution.
Privacy considerations
Clarity automatically masks text inside form fields and password inputs so no sensitive data is recorded. It uses a first-party cookie for session continuity. In the UK and EU, Clarity falls under PECR/GDPR, so you will need a cookie consent mechanism if you're targeting EU visitors — the same rule that applies to Google Analytics. If you prefer a cookieless setup, use VeloCMS's built-in server-side analytics instead (or pair both — Clarity for qualitative behaviour, server-side for accurate traffic counts).