Heatmap and Session Recording features are bundled together and you may be wondering how to disable the Session Recording feature only. Luckily, there is a way to disable Session Recording alone with a single setting.

Things to consider:

  • Disabling Session Recording is applied to all the websites in your Matomo
  • All the existing session recordings will be deleted across all the websites
  • Heatmaps will still work unless you disable the Heatmaps feature too

Please follow the steps below to disable session recording:

  1. Login to Matomo as Super User
  2. Click on “Administration (cog icon on the top right)”
  3. Click on “Settings > General Settings”
  4. Scroll down to “HeatmapSessionRecording”
  5. Click on “Disable Session recording” check box
  6. Save

How to enable Session Recording again?
To enable Session recording again, follow the same steps as mentioned above.

How to prevent super users from enabling this feature again ?
It is possible that a Super User may accidentally enable the feature again. In order to prevent this from happening, below setting could be added to the config/config.ini.php. Once the setting is added to the config.ini.php file, the option to Disable/Enable Session Recording will not be available in the user interface anymore. If you’re using Matomo Cloud, you may have to get in touch with our Cloud Support team.

[HeatmapSessionRecording]
disableSessionRecording=1

Previous FAQ: Can anonymous users view session recordings?