Best Live Chat Plugins for WordPress

One of the biggest problems with online businesses is that they aren’t very personal. Prospective customers often have a ton of questions that they’d (ideally) like answered in real time. For this reason, delivering value and providing a memorable user experience every single time is essential.

Rather than expecting your visitors to interact with you through contact forms and by submitting query tickets, you could consider offering online chat support. This would allow you to provide timely answers to interested prospects and potentially convert them to loyal customers.

With this in mind, in this post, we’ll run the rule over seven of the best – free and premium – live chat solutions guaranteed to help you improve your online business by letting prospects know they can contact you instantly. Before we dive into the roundup, let’s take a closer look at why you should offer live chat in the first place.

Why Should You Offer Live Chat?

Listening to and responding to your customer’s questions and concerns about your product allows you to establish an open dialogue and speed through the consumer’s buying process. Connecting customers with live chat support staff lets you immediately engage them with your brand.

And if that’s not enough to convince you, here are a few more reasons why you may want to consider offering live chat support through your website:

• Convenience. Gives your customers immediate access to a support representative.
• Cost efficient. Allows agents to manage concurrent chats. It also saves you a bunch on phone expenses.
• Increases sales. Online chat functionality lets you guide customers through a sale and reduces bounce and cart abandonment rates.
• Competitive advantage. Since many online businesses aren’t offering live chat functionality, it gives you a major competitive advantage.

Now that you know better how integrating live chat support into your website can benefit your online business. Let’s go over some of the best live chat solutions for WordPress.

What Are Some of the Best Live Chat Plugins for WordPress?

As an online business owner, you’re always looking for ways to deliver a better user experience while ensuring you stay within budget. Adding online chat functionality isn’t only incredibly convenient for customers and cost-efficient for you.

In this section, we’ll run the rule over seven of the best (free and premium) live chat plugins for WordPress websites and highlight their standout features.

Tidio Live Chat

Tidio Live Chat is a lightweight plugin that enables you to offer live chat functionality through your website. It’s super easy to install, and you won’t be prompted to create an account or register to get started.

Once you’ve activated the plugin, a live chat option will appear on your site’s front end, allowing your customers to interact with your support staff. The plugin also shows you a list of visitors who are currently online so you can send them personalized messages to initiate the dialogue. As of this writing, Tidio Live Chat supports English and Polish, though more languages will soon be added.

The Tidio Live Chat plugin comes in both free and premium flavors. You can test the premium version out for a 7-day trial period and then decide to continue with the premium version or downgrade to the free version.

Key Features:

• Allows you to view and keep track of online visitors.
• Customization options for the front-end online chat module.
• Lets you contact visitors via email when they’re offline.
• Comes with built-in offline message forms for when you aren’t online.

Zendesk Chat

Zopim’s Zendesk Chat is one of the most popular live chat plugins for WordPress websites. It lets you answer customer queries in real time and helps ease them into making a purchase. The plugin allows your customers to launch the live chat widget on the front end whenever they’re ready to begin the interaction. On the back end, your live chat support team will be able to manage multiple conversations through the online dashboard.

The Zendesk Chat plugin lets you customize the chat widget to match your website’s design. Its built-in dashboard lets you track user activity and manage chats through a user-friendly interface. If you don’t have an online chat support team, you can opt for 24-hour support from Zendesk’s in-house trained experts.

The Zendesk Chat plugin is available in over 40 languages and is compatible with all significant web browsers right out of the box. It also seamlessly integrates with several third-party services, including Zendesk, Salesforce, and UserVoice.

Key Features:

• Comes with a mobile-optimized online chat widget right out of the box.
• Allows you to set up triggers to reach every visitor proactively.
• Built-in analytics dashboard makes tracking visitors and usage patterns easy.
• Guarantees a 99.8% average uptime.

WP Live Chat Support

If you’re looking for a simple live chat plugin to help you get started with minimal hassle, the WP Live Chat Support plugin is the best option. Once the plugin is installed and activated, you can immediately begin chatting with visitors without messing around with third-party connections.

This feature-rich online chat plugin lets you chat with unlimited visitors at a time through an intuitive user interface. Regarding customization power, the WP Live Chat Support plugin lets you modify the text fields displayed in the live chat box and try out different color combinations to complement your site’s existing design. It even comes with six pre-designed live chat box themes that make it easy to get started with the plugin in a few simple steps.

The WP Live Chat Support plugin comes with a Node.js message relay server, which allows you to optimize your online chats for performance and respond to your prospects at lightning-fast speeds.

Key Features:

• Offers a fully customizable live chat experience with animations and themes.
• Allows you to add surveys/polls before or after the chat session.
• No Powered by or advertisements displayed on the front-end.
• Gives you desktop notifications whenever you receive new live chats.

Live Chat from ClickDesk

Live Chat from ClickDesk markets itself as the fastest live chat plugin. It takes live chat functionality up a notch by offering your website’s visitors the ability to interact with you via voice chat and video chat without installing additional software. Its built-in powerful help desk lets you manage offline conversations and emails efficiently and effectively.

The standout feature of ClickDesk is its incredibly powerful and flexible nature. It lets your live chat support agents answer customers’ online chats, calls, and video chats from a separate agent panel, the ClickDesk mobile app, or Google Talk.

The Live Chat from ClickDesk plugin lets you send and receive files directly from within the chat widget. In addition to this, you also have the option to store all chat transcriptions and review them later on to improve your marketing strategies.

Key Features:

• Offers advanced chat queuing functionality to optimize online chat for performance.
• Allows you to customize themes, colors, typography, and more.
• Comes with advanced analytics and reporting functionality.
• Integrates with third-party services like Salesforce, Zendesk, Sugar CRM, and more.

LiveChat

LiveChat is a premium live chat service that offers a free 30-day trial for users who want to try it out. It offers round-the-clock live chat for your customers and lets you initiate the conversation. When the chat session is complete, the LiveChat tool lets you request feedback from the customer.

When you register with LiveChat, your live chat support agents will get access to the service’s built-in dashboard. From there, the agents can manage online chat sessions through a color-coded system designed for speedy responses. In addition to this, it also lets you set up pre-made responses to frequently asked questions so that you can solve customer queries efficiently.

LiveChat even comes with some pretty neat features for online business owners. Its built-in analytics and reporting system lets you review the state of your customer service and online chat at a glance by giving you the most important statistics gathered over the last seven days.

Key Features:

• Offers advanced chat tools such as chat tags, file sharing, and delivery status.
• Allows you to customize chat window themes, add logos, modify labels, and more.
• Comes with powerful analytics and reporting functionality right out of the box.
• Integrates with Google Analytics, Facebook, Salesforce, and more.

Olark

Olark is a comprehensive, premium live chat service that offers a high-quality online chat experience and helps you understand user behavior on your site. The Olark process is easy to understand. You start by peeking into your customers’ shopping carts and observing how they interact with your website. This way, your live chat agents are prepared to answer any queries whenever the customers are ready to begin chatting.

Getting started with Olark is incredibly easy – all you have to do is insert a code snippet into your site, and you can chat with your visitors immediately. In addition, you can customize the front-end widget to blend in with your website’s existing design by playing around with its themes, languages, color palettes, and typography.

Key Features:

• Intuitive, user-friendly interface.
• Lets you configure custom messages for online and offline modes.
• Allows you to set up surveys and polls to get instant feedback.
• Integrates seamlessly with Salesforce, Zendesk, Google Analytics, and more.

SnapEngage

SnapEngage is one of the most popular premium chat services. It owes its popularity to the powerful functionality and flexibility it offers to both users and their customers. Its advanced chat portal combines all the tools you need to engage, support, and convert prospects into customers.

SnapEngage allows you to review comprehensive visitor information and even pulls useful information about them from their social media profiles. This lets your live chat agents interact with prospective customers more personally. It also enables you to transfer chats to different agents or support tiers.

In addition, you can monitor what your customers are typing and configure concurrent chats to ensure an optimal response time. SnapEngage is an excellent choice for power users looking to integrate top-notch online chat functionality into their website.

Key Features:

• Fully responsive design.
• Lets you send and receive files through the online chat widget.
• Allows you to customize click-to-chat buttons, chat box, and pre-chat form.
• Integrates seamlessly with Salesforce, Zendesk, Facebook, UserVoice, and more.

Conclusion

When implemented correctly, live chat increases your website’s value and can convert interested prospects into loyal customers. Hopefully, you’re in an excellent position to identify what you’re looking for in a live chat solution and get started with one of the plugins we covered in this post.

The live chat solution you ultimately end up going with will depend on your business’s requirements:

• If you want to test out live chat functionality on your site and see if it works well with your online business, then Tidio Live Chat is the best option for you.
• Those of you who are looking for a feature-rich live chat plugin should opt for Live Chat by ClickDesk.
• If budget isn’t an issue for you, then LiveChat is one of the best premium live chat solutions that comes with everything you could need to deliver a memorable user experience.

Have you ever integrated live chat functionality into your WordPress website? Which plugin did you use? Let us know by commenting below!