What is session replay?
A plain-English explanation of session replay — what it records, how it works, what it's good for, and how it stays private.
Session replay (sometimes called session recording) reconstructs a real visitor’s experience on your website so you can watch it back like a video — the mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, page changes, and form interactions — to understand exactly what happened.
It isn’t a literal screen recording. Instead, the page’s structure and the visitor’s actions are captured as lightweight events and replayed in a player, which keeps recordings small and makes them searchable.
What session replay captures
- Clicks and taps, including rapid “rage clicks” on unresponsive elements
- Scrolling and mouse movement, so you can see where attention goes
- Page and route changes across a visit
- Form interactions (with sensitive inputs masked by default)
- Console errors, ideally linked to the exact moment they occurred
What it’s good for
Analytics tells you that people dropped off; replay shows you why. Common uses:
- Finding the checkout or onboarding step where users get stuck
- Reproducing a bug by watching the session where it happened
- Turning support tickets into “watch what the customer did” instead of “can you reproduce it?”
Session replay and privacy
Done responsibly, replay masks form inputs by default, honors the browser’s Do Not Track signal, can be gated behind a consent banner, and stores data in a region you choose. YakDesk does all four, records every session with no sampling, keeps a rolling 90-day window on every plan, and is hosted in the EU.
Want to see it on your own site? Start a free trial — one snippet and you’re recording in minutes.