Umami Session Replays: See How Visitors Actually Use Your Website

Updated: August 2026

Traditional analytics tell you what happened on your website: how many people visited, which pages they viewed, and which events they triggered.

Session Replays add another layer of insight. They let you watch recordings of real visitor sessions and see how people actually interact with your website—including clicks, scrolling, navigation, and form interactions.

For developers, replays can help diagnose confusing UX and reproduce bugs. For small business owners, bloggers, and Shopify store owners, they provide behavioral evidence that can help explain why visitors aren't doing what you expect.

This guide explains what Umami Replays are, how to enable them, how the recording settings work, and how to get useful insights from your sessions.

What are Session Replays?

Umami Replays let you watch a recreation of a visitor's session on your website.

The replay player can show:

Mouse movement and clicks
Scrolling behavior
Page navigation
Form interactions
Inputs, with form fields masked by default

Rather than simply looking at a list of pageviews, you can see how visitors move through your pages and interact with the interface.

That can make it much easier to investigate questions such as:

Why aren't visitors clicking this button?
Where are people getting stuck?
Are visitors finding the information they're looking for?
Is a particular form confusing?
What happens immediately before visitors leave?
Can we reproduce a UX problem reported by a customer?

Why use Session Replays?

Consider an ecommerce product page that gets plenty of traffic but produces relatively few purchases.

Traditional analytics might show:

Product page → lots of visitors → few purchases

That's useful, but it doesn't necessarily explain what's going wrong.

A replay might reveal visitors repeatedly interacting with an element they expect to be clickable, struggling to find product information, or abandoning the page after encountering a confusing part of the interface.

The replay doesn't automatically tell you why someone behaved that way, but it gives you real behavioral evidence that can help you form and test a hypothesis.

For developers

Replays can be particularly useful when investigating unexpected behavior.

Instead of relying entirely on a bug report such as "the checkout page doesn't work," you can examine real sessions and see what happened before the visitor abandoned the process.

They're also useful for identifying confusing interactions and reproducing UX problems that are difficult to recreate in a development environment.

For small businesses

You don't need a large analytics team to benefit from session recordings.

If your website generates leads, inquiries, bookings, or sales, replays can help you understand whether visitors are finding important information and whether your calls to action are working as intended.

For bloggers

Analytics can tell you which articles attract visitors. Replays can provide additional insight into how those visitors interact with the content.

You can see scrolling behavior, navigation, and interactions with page elements, helping you understand how readers actually use your site.

For Shopify store owners

For an online store, seemingly small usability problems can affect conversions.

Replays can help you investigate the journey through your storefront, including how visitors interact with product pages, navigation, and other parts of the shopping experience.

How Replays work in Umami

There are two important parts to enabling Replays:

Enable Replays for the website in Umami.
Update your tracker script to opt in to replay collection.

Simply enabling the feature in the Umami dashboard isn't enough. Your website also needs the replay recorder script.

Once enabled, only new sessions are recorded. Umami does not backfill existing session history.

Umami stores session replays for 30 days.

How to enable Replays

Enabling Replays takes just a few steps.

Step 1: Open your website settings

Log into Umami and select Websites from the sidebar.

Find the website for which you want to enable Replays and click Edit.

Step 2: Open Replays & Heatmaps

In the website settings, navigate to the Replays & Heatmaps section.

Turn on the Replays toggle.

You'll also find several options that control how recordings are collected.

Step 3: Configure your recording settings

Umami provides four Replay options.

Sample Rate

Sample Rate controls what fraction of sessions will be recorded.

The value ranges from 0 to 1.

For example:

1 = record 100% of sessions
0.5 = record 50% of sessions
0.15 = record 15% of sessions

The default is 0.15, meaning Umami records approximately 15% of sessions.

Sampling can be useful when you don't need to record every session and want a representative selection of visitor behavior.

Mask Level

Mask Level controls how much information is hidden in replays for privacy.

Umami provides two levels:

Moderate — masks all input fields.
Strict — masks all inputs and all text on the page.

The default is moderate.

This setting is particularly important for websites that collect information through forms. Before enabling Replays, consider what information could appear on your pages and choose an appropriate masking level for your use case.

Max Duration

Max Duration sets the maximum length of a recording in milliseconds.

The default is:

That's 5 minutes.

Once the maximum duration is reached, recording stops automatically.

Block Selector

Block Selector lets you specify a CSS selector for elements that should be completely excluded from recording.

For example:

.sensitive-widget

You can use this when there is a particular component on your website that you don't want included in recordings.

If you have sensitive or private areas on a page, consider whether they should be excluded using an appropriate selector in addition to the masking settings.

Step 4: Update your website's tracker

After enabling Replays in Umami, you also need to update your website to opt in to replay collection.

The replay recorder uses recorder.js.

A basic installation looks like this:

<script
  defer
  src="https://your-umami-domain.example/recorder.js"
  data-website-id="YOUR-WEBSITE-ID"
></script>

Replace the example URL with the URL of your Umami installation and use the website ID for the website you're tracking.

Your existing Umami analytics tracking script and the replay recorder serve different purposes: the recorder script is what opts the website into Replay collection.

If you're using Umami Cloud or a self-hosted installation, use the appropriate script URL for your environment.

Step 5: Test your setup

Once you've enabled Replays and added the recorder script, visit your website in a new session.

Interact with the site as a normal visitor would. Click links, scroll through pages, navigate between pages, and interact with forms.

Then return to Umami and check the Replays screen.

Remember that only sessions that start after Replays have been enabled will be recorded. Existing sessions aren't retroactively converted into replays.

How to access your Replays

There are two ways to access session recordings in Umami.

From the Replays screen

Open the Replays screen to browse available recordings.

You can select a replay and click the play button to open it in the replay player.

From a session profile

You can also access a replay through a visitor session profile.

Open the session and navigate to its Replays tab.

This can be particularly useful when you've already identified an interesting session through your normal analytics and want to see what the visitor actually did.

Using the Replay player

When you open a replay, Umami provides a player that recreates the visitor's session.

You can see things such as:

Mouse movement and clicks

See where visitors move their mouse and what they click.

Scrolling

See how visitors move through the page and which sections they reach.

Navigation

Follow the visitor as they move between pages.

Form interactions

See interactions with forms while inputs remain masked according to the configured privacy settings.

This combination can provide considerably more context than a simple pageview report.

Saving important Replays

You don't have to keep searching for particularly useful recordings.

Umami lets you save individual Replays for quick access later.

When viewing a replay, click Save in the player toolbar and give the replay a name.

Saved replays are flagged and become available in the Saved tab.

This is useful for keeping examples of:

Interesting user journeys
Reproducible UX problems
Important conversion journeys
Unusual visitor behavior
Sessions that demonstrate a design problem
Before-and-after examples when testing a redesign

Think of saved replays as a small library of behavioral evidence you can return to.

What should you look for?

It's tempting to open Session Replays and randomly watch recordings.

That can be interesting—but it isn't necessarily the most effective way to use them.

Start with a question.

Why aren't visitors completing our signup form?

Then look for sessions that can help you investigate that question.

Look for hesitation

Do visitors repeatedly move around the same section without taking an action?

That might suggest the next step isn't obvious or that the content isn't communicating what you intended.

Look for unexpected clicks

Do visitors repeatedly click something that isn't actually interactive?

That could indicate that the design makes an element look clickable when it isn't.

Look for dead ends

A visitor might reach an important page and then leave.

Look at what happened immediately before they left. Was the next step unclear? Did they encounter an unexpected interaction? Was important information difficult to find?

Look for unexpected navigation

Visitors don't always follow the journey you designed.

That's useful information.

Your site's navigation might make perfect sense to you while visitors use it in a completely different way.

A practical workflow for using Replays

You don't need an elaborate analytics process.

A simple five-step workflow works well:

1. Identify a problem

Use your normal Umami analytics to find a page, event, or conversion that isn't performing as expected.

2. Watch relevant sessions

Open Replays associated with that part of the visitor journey.

3. Find a pattern

Don't redesign your website because of one unusual visitor.

Look for behavior that occurs repeatedly across multiple sessions.

4. Make an improvement

Based on what you've observed, change the relevant part of the experience.

That might mean improving copy, changing a call to action, simplifying navigation, or fixing a confusing interaction.

5. Measure the result

Return to your normal Umami analytics and see whether the change affected the metric you're trying to improve.

Then repeat the process.

Analytics → Replay → Hypothesis → Change → Measurement

That's where Session Replays become genuinely useful.

Privacy matters

Session recordings contain behavioral information about real visitors, so privacy should be considered before enabling the feature.

Umami provides masking controls specifically for this purpose.

At the default moderate masking level, input fields are masked. The strict setting goes further by masking all inputs and all text on the page.

You can also use Block Selector to completely exclude particular elements from recording.

Think carefully about pages and components that could contain sensitive information, including:

Passwords
Payment information
Personal information
Private messages
Other sensitive user-provided data

Your privacy obligations will depend on your website, visitors, and jurisdiction. Make sure your use of behavioral analytics is consistent with the privacy and consent requirements that apply to your site.

Replays aren't a replacement for user research

A replay shows you what someone did. It doesn't necessarily tell you what they were thinking.

For example, if a visitor scrolls up and down several times, you can form a hypothesis about why—but you shouldn't assume you know the answer.

The strongest insights usually come from combining different sources:

Analytics tell you what is happening.

Session Replays show you how it's happening.

User feedback and testing can help explain why.

Together, they give you a much stronger foundation for making website improvements.

A quick checklist

Ready to try Umami Replays?

Use this checklist:

Open Websites in Umami.
Click Edit for your website.
Open Replays & Heatmaps.
Enable Replays.
Choose an appropriate Sample Rate.
Review your Mask Level.
Set Max Duration if the default isn't appropriate.
Add a Block Selector for any elements that should be completely excluded.
Add the recorder.js script to your website.
Start a new session and test the site.
Open the Replays screen in Umami.
Save useful recordings for future reference.

Final thoughts

Traditional analytics answer questions such as how many people visited, which pages they viewed, and which events they triggered.

Session Replays add another important dimension:

What did visitors actually do?

For developers, that can mean a faster way to investigate UX problems. For small business owners, it can reveal friction in the customer journey. For bloggers, it can provide insight into how readers interact with content. And for Shopify store owners, it can help uncover problems in the storefront experience.

The key is to use Replays as an investigation tool rather than simply watching recordings for entertainment.

Start with a question. Find relevant sessions. Look for patterns. Make a change. Then measure the result.

With that approach, Umami Session Replays become more than recordings of website visits—they become a practical source of evidence for building a better website.

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