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whoisbrowsing

Watch SaaS Signups Land and Get Stuck

Updated

TL;DR

To watch users onboard live, install whoisbrowsing on the pages people pass through before they become users: the landing page, pricing, sign-up and any public docs. You see each visitor's cursor move on your real page, where they came from, and when they stop, without storing a recording.

What it can and cannot cover

Be clear about the boundary first. The whoisbrowsing script is a visitor view for a website. If your sign-up form and first-run screens are on the same website where you install the script, you can watch people move through those pages. Inside a logged-in app, the pages may carry user data, and you decide whether to install there. We suggest starting with public pages.

Two things to know before you add the tag to logged-in pages. First, page text is never sent, so you watch a visitor's cursor drawn over your own copy of the page, as your own browser shows it; on a screen that differs per user, you see your version, not theirs. Second, URL tokens in a path (UUIDs, long hex strings and long random tokens) are sent as :id, but a short number such as /projects/42 is sent as it is.

Your visitors' browsers send the page, pointer position, clicks, scroll, device type, source, browser and operating system, and time on site. Never keystrokes, form values or page text. So you will see that someone clicked into the email field of your sign-up form, but never what they typed.

Where founders get stuck watching

Early on, watching a few real people closely can teach a founder more than a large report. A live view is built for that moment:

  • The landing page. Does the cursor go to your call to action, or hover on a feature name?
  • The sign-up page. Does a visitor arrive and leave in seconds, or move around the form and pause?
  • The first page after sign-up. If it is on the same site and you have installed the script there, do new users find the next step?
  • Phones. Phone and tablet visitors appear as a see-through band over the part of the page they are looking at, so you can tell whether the button is in view.

A concrete routine

  1. Install the script on the site that holds your marketing and sign-up pages:
<script src="https://live.whoisbrowsing.com/s.js" data-site="YOUR_SITE_ID" defer></script>
  1. Turn on the arrival notification. When someone new lands, the notification names the landing page. Alerts come from the open dashboard tab, so keep that tab open (how alerts work).
  2. Open the live view and keep it beside your work.
  3. When a visitor lands on sign-up, watch what the cursor does for the next minute.
  4. Write down the one thing you would change, then change it after the session.

The alert plus the live view works well for the first weeks after a release, when a few visitors each hour matter.

The side panel for onboarding

The panel keeps live counts per page, busiest first, and one line per person with source, approximate city, device, browser and operating system, time on site and pages this visit. Reading a few of these lines side by side will tell you which source brings visitors who browse more pages and which bounce. It is a hint, not a statistic: with a handful of people, treat every pattern as a question to test, not a result.

Nothing replayed, nothing stored

Because nothing about your visitors is stored on our servers, there is nothing to replay later and nothing to leak. That is a deliberate choice. It also means that if a user hit a bug and left, you cannot go back and watch it. Pair the live view with error monitoring and your product analytics for that.

When whoisbrowsing is NOT the right tool

If you need to see what happened inside a logged-in session after the fact, find rage clicks, or build a funnel, use a product analytics or session replay tool such as PostHog, Microsoft Clarity or Contentsquare (which Hotjar is now part of). whoisbrowsing does not attach a visitor to an account or a person, and it cannot show what a user typed.

Getting started quickly

You can start with no account: /try creates a site, and you claim it later. If you build with an AI coding agent, one prompt installs it (install with an AI agent). For the pricing step of the journey, see who is reading your pricing page. See How it works and the privacy page for the details. Visitors from the EU/EEA, UK and Switzerland, and browsers with Global Privacy Control, are never shown, so your own testing from those places will not appear as a visitor. It is free, with no credit card.