What is a dead click? How to find and fix them

What a dead click is

A dead click is a click on a web page that gets no response: nothing on the page changes, it doesn’t scroll, no new page loads and focus doesn’t move. Cuttl waits 1 second after each click before calling it dead. A typical example is a product photo that visitors tap expecting it to zoom, when it is only a plain image.

One dead click is a small moment of confusion. Hundreds on the same element mean the page is telling visitors that something works when it doesn’t, and some of them leave because of it.

What counts as a response

Whether a click is dead depends on what the tool treats as a response, and that rule decides how many false alarms you get. Cuttl counts a click as answered when, within 1 second:

• the page content changes, for example a menu opens or a message appears,
• the page or any part of it scrolls,
• the address changes or a new page starts loading,
• focus moves to another element, such as a field or a dialog,
• or, on plain text that doesn’t look clickable, text gets selected.

Two cases are never dead. A click on a form field always counts as answered, because fields respond by taking focus and typing, which doesn’t change the page. And changes from background animation, such as a carousel or animated artwork that redraws itself many times a second, don’t count as an answer to a click, so a click on a moving element with no real effect is still dead.

Common causes of dead clicks

Most dead clicks come from design that promises an action the page doesn’t take, and the rest from code that should respond but fails.

• Images that look zoomable or linked: product photos, logos of partners, thumbnails in a gallery.
• Text styled like a link or button: underlined words, coloured headings, cards with a hover shadow but no link.
• Icons with no action, such as a chevron next to a heading or an info icon with no tooltip.
• Disabled buttons that look enabled, for example a Continue button that stays inactive until a hidden field is filled in.
• Slow responses: a button that does work, but takes longer than a second to show anything.
• Broken scripts: a click handler that never loads because of a JavaScript error, a blocked script or a failed request.

The first four are design problems, and the fix is usually to make the element do what visitors expect or to stop it looking clickable. The last two are technical, and session recordings with the browser console and network requests usually show which one it is.

Dead clicks, rage clicks and error clicks

Dead clicks, rage clicks and error clicks are three different frustration signals, and they often show up together. A dead click is one click with no response. A rage click is repeated clicking in the same spot, three or more clicks within a second that mostly get no response. An error click is a click followed by a JavaScript error.

A dead click often comes first: a visitor clicks once, nothing happens, and they click again harder. Many visitors don’t rage click at all and just leave, so dead clicks catch problems that rage clicks miss. The guide to rage clicks and dead clicks covers how the two signals relate and which to fix first.

How to find and rank dead clicks

Find dead clicks by grouping them by element and page, then rank them by how many sessions they affect. One visitor who taps a photo twelve times counts twelve clicks but is only one person.

• Start with a dead click heatmap of your key pages: product pages, pricing, sign-up and checkout. Dead clicks gather on the elements that mislead.
• For each hot spot, note the number of sessions with a dead click there and the share of the page’s sessions that is.
• Watch five to ten recordings of those sessions. Check what the visitor wanted and whether they found another way or left.
• Put the elements on the path to a conversion first. A dead click on the delivery note in a cart matters more than one on a blog footer.

The heatmap examples guide shows what a dead click pattern looks like next to other common heatmap patterns.

How to fix dead clicks and check the fix

Fix a dead click by making the element do what visitors expect, or by making it stop looking clickable. Which one is right depends on what visitors were trying to do in the recordings.

• If many visitors want the action, add it: let the product photo open a zoom view, or turn the heading into a link to the section it names.
• If the action makes no sense, remove the cue: drop the underline, the hover effect or the pointer cursor.
• If the element is slow, show feedback at once, such as a spinner or a pressed state, so the visitor knows the click registered.
• If a script failed, fix the error and check the element across browsers.

Then check that the fix worked. Compare the element’s dead clicks and the page’s conversion rate before and after the change, or run the change as an A/B test when the page has enough traffic. A before and after analysis works for smaller pages.

Dead clicks in Cuttl

In Cuttl’s Journey Insights, dead clicks are detected automatically on every page with the Cuttl Tag, using the 1 second rule above. On every plan:

• The heatmap has a Dead clicks view that shows where they land and which elements get the most.
• Issues groups dead clicks on the same element into one issue, with the affected sessions and estimated lost conversions, ranked by severity.
• Recordings can be filtered to sessions with frustration signals, and each dead click is marked on the recording’s timeline.
• The experience score (0 to 100) counts dead clicks as one of the frustration signals that lower a session’s score.
• A/B tests in Web Experiments can use dead clicks as a metric, so a fix can be tested on fewer dead clicks as well as on conversions.

On Pro and Max, segments can also filter to visitors who dead-clicked one specific element, which helps when the same page has several problems.

Common questions