Webchat & Website Performance
A fast website means happier customers, better rankings on Google, and ultimately, more sales. We work to ensure that the webchat widget won’t affect your site’s performance so you can give your customers the best experience possible. Here are a few commonly asked questions about how webchat works with your website:
Will webchat slow down my website’s performance?
The webchat JavaScript tag loads at the same time as the rest of your site and doesn’t add to the overall loading time because it’s being loaded by another source. In other words, if your page loads 10 elements and you add webchat, your website is still only loading 10 elements while the webchat widget loads on its own. In addition, users can use your website while webchat is loading in the background. Be aware that the webchat widget meets Google’s compression standards and uses GZIP compression.
Why does Google PageSpeed Insights say that webchat resources need to be fixed?
In general, browser caching can boost page speed because retrieving a resource locally is faster and more consistent than retrieving it over the internet each time. For that reason, 3rd-party speed test tools will flag resources that have short cache times. Google recommends a minimum cache time of one week and preferably up to one year for static assets or assets that change infrequently.
The webchat chat widget is not static. It is regularly updated and improved by both customer setting changes and software releases. It has a short cache time (between 45 minutes and 3 hours) because we want your website visitors to see changes as quickly as possible. Because the webchat widget intentionally has a short cache time, you can dismiss these notifications.
You may also get notifications from these popular 3rd-party diagnostic tools:
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- YSlow
- Pingdom
- GTMetrix
- WebPagetest.org
Why do tests show that webchat is slowing down my website?
There are several possible reasons why a speed test of your website would report an increase in page load time:
- Your speed test is measuring “total load time” instead of the actual time it takes to load your page. The speed test waits a few moments after the last element is loaded to see if anything else loads later, and counts that toward the total.
- Another script on your page is preventing webchat from loading.
- The speed test is penalizing you for not caching the script that contains your widget settings. That script is not static and shouldn’t be cached longterm.