If you’re looking for a live chat option on your WordPress website, Kori Ashton shows you three different plugins. Some of these have totally free options – which is always in the budget. Remember that using a live chat feature on your website could increase sales and engagement. It’s a simple plugin to add a powerful feature. Each of these live chat plugins offer support and resources to learn how to customize and use their platforms.
Full Transcript
Hey, y’all, my name’s Kori Ashton. Happy WordPress Wednesday, I hope you’re having a great one. Today I wanna walk you through three different options to include a live chat feature inside of your WordPress website. It’s gonna be easy, let’s go take a look.
The question actually came in on my YouTube channel, on a video from Pradeesh Ravi. Sorry if I’m not pronouncing your name incorrectly, but I so appreciate you just taking a minute to give kind feedback or a question, it’s really cool. And he’s asking me here,
“Your videos have been very useful in maintaining my website. Do you have any suggestion as to which plugin to use in order to enable live chat on my website? This way I could reach out to the customer the moment they visit them.”
So I love this question. I know a lot of you probably want to engage your customers as they’re visiting your website, in real-time conversation.
- How do you do that efficiently?
- How do you do that budget-consciously?
- What do you use?
- What tools do you use?
I’m happy to report that there are three that I have vetted, I know the reviews on, and I can tell you right now, we’ve got some options in the budget of free.
Live Chat Plugin – Zendesk Chat
The first one I am most familiar with is Zendesk Chat. It used to be called Zopim. That’s when I was using it for most of my clients. This is a really great, great resource for you, especially if you only need one operator communicating with your customers.
It has really good analytics, super ridiculously easy to install, you can customize it to match the colors on your website, really really easy, and again, it’s in that budget of free option.
So what you would do is come over here to the actual plugin, or you’d go to your dashboard and go to plugins and click add new. And you’re able to just come install the plugin that they created that Zendesk has, for WordPress. And it plugs right into your website.
Again, there’s a free option, so we love that, that’s always in the budget. And it’s free for the life of the use of the tool, as long as you meet the requirements of, I think it’s one user, so you wanna have just one operator speaking back and forth. And then you only get to keep a 14-day chat history. So you have to just kind of be aware of how you’re using this tool.
Of course, they have upgrade options. If you have a budget in the range of 20 dollars, you’re really gonna be able to have a lot more options open up for you.
Live Chat Plugin – Live Chat
The second one we can look at has great reviews as well. It’s called LiveChat, and they also have a plugin that you can use, and just drop right into your WordPress website. So you see here that it has 20 plus active installs, it’s been updated recently, and you wanna just be sure that it’s been tested with your most recent version of WordPress. So currently it’s been tested up with the famous 5.0.
They do have an option for you to do a free trial, but it is a fully paid system moving forward. Here’s what I want you to do, though. Look at the different features and try to understand what it is that you might be needing. And if you say, “Well I’ve never had a live chat feature before, I don’t know what I need,” then start with a budget of free, and see if that meets your needs. I would suggest again, trying out Zendesk Chat, just to see if that meets your needs.
If you want more robust data, if you want the ability to have more operators on your team, if you wanna be able to keep the chat history longer, whatever that looks like. You’ll start to know that over time. And what you won’t do is waste your budget.
Live Chat Plugin – WP Live Chat Support
So be sure to look at both of these, LiveChat and Zendesk Chat, and the third one that I’ve looked at is WP Live Chat Support. Now this one has over 60,000 installs, has great reviews, and it has been tested again with Gutenberg 5.0, so that’s exciting to see that they’re already that up to date and current with their code. Very exciting stuff, and really, really good for you to use.
Also, it has unlimited live chat agents. So very, very cool options here. These are the three I’ll suggest to you, and of course, I will always put all the links in the description box below, so that you can easily access these three. You just go into your WordPress dashboard, go to plugins, and click add new. That’s where you’re gonna find all of these living, because they already have plugins specifically for WordPress.
Remember you need to be on the self-hosted version of WordPress in order to do this. Something you absolutely wanna keep in mind is that you can improve your sales, you can increase your sales, they say up to about 30 percent more, if you’re able to watch when a visitor lands on your website, and engage with them as soon as possible, answering their questions quickly, confirming that you are the professional service or product that they’re looking for.
It’s very exciting to see how you can utilize live chat. The other great thing about it is, a lot of times if you’re away from your desk, and you need to access that conversation, you can just get a notification on your phone, and you’ll be able to sit right there and chat with the customer while you’re out and about.
This is a great, great resource for small to medium-sized businesses that don’t have a large team to monitor this, and just to sit at your computer all day long. Hope this helps, y’all, and thanks again for sending in the question. It’s very kind of you to give great feedback, it’s very much an encouragement to me. I will see y’all next WordPress Wednesday. Bye everyone.
