Low-activity session cleanup
Why some recordings show a “this recording was cleared” message instead of a player, and why your analytics for that session are still correct.
What gets cleared
Sessions with at least one but no more than 10 events in total — essentially the visitor landed, and did at most one real thing (a click, a scroll, a keypress) beyond the automatic page-load events — carry a full-page screenshot (the “recording”) that almost nobody ever watches. A session with zero events is never cleared. After a grace period set by your plan, we clear that screenshot so your session list stays focused on replays worth watching.
Only the recording's full-page snapshot is removed. The session itself, and every other event on it, stays exactly as it was.
What stays accurate
- Duration, entry/exit pages, and bounce status
- Pageviews and goal conversions
- UTM, device, and geo data
- The session's place in visitor journeys and reports
None of those are computed from the recording — they're computed from the session's other events, which cleanup never touches. A cleared session counts the same in your dashboards as it did the day it happened.
What you lose
Just playback. A cleared session can no longer be watched as a replay, because the screenshot it would render from is gone.
Seeing them anyway
Your sessions list hides cleared sessions by default to keep it focused on replays you can actually watch. When you open the filters popover, a checkbox labeled “Show cleared sessions” reveals how many were hidden in the current view. Toggle it on, and the list expands to include them alongside active replays — their page, device, country, referrer, and duration are all intact, only the replay is gone.
Grace period by plan
Cleanup runs nightly and only clears low-activity sessions older than your plan's grace period below.
- Free, 7 days
- Starter, 14 days
- Growth, 30 days
- Agency, 60 days
- Enterprise, 7 days
This grace period is separate from your plan's overall data retention window, which governs when the full session (not just its recording) is deleted. See Data retention & deletion for that breakdown.