A checklist before you go live

None of this is required. All of it is cheaper to do now than to discover later, usually at the point somebody has already had a bad experience.

1. Check the domain list

Settings → Websites → your site → Install. The widget only loads on the domains listed there. If you have a staging site, a www and a non-www, or a checkout on a different subdomain, they all need to be on it. Missing one is the single most common reason the widget does not appear.

2. Decide what you ask for before a chat starts

Chat form controls whether somebody has to give a name, an email address and a phone number before they can type. Each can be off, optional or required.

Asking for nothing gets you more conversations. Asking for an email gets you fewer, but means you can answer the ones that walk away. There is no right answer, only a trade, and you can change it whenever you like.

3. Set your opening hours

Without hours, the widget says you are online whenever somebody loads the page, including at two in the morning. With them, it says when you will be back and takes an email address instead. What your customers see outside your hours shows both states.

4. Write three saved replies

Not thirty. The three answers you already know you will type every day: delivery, returns, and whatever your product’s version of “how much is it” happens to be. Saved replies covers how to write ones that do not sound like a form letter.

5. Turn notifications on, on purpose

A chat nobody is told about is a chat nobody answers. Go through notifications once, with the people who will actually be answering, and agree who gets told about what.

6. Send yourself a chat from a phone

Not the desktop preview. An actual phone, on the real site. It is the fastest way to find a layout problem, and it takes a minute.

7. Decide what happens to old chats

Settings → Data & privacy controls how long finished conversations are kept and whether a chat nobody is having closes itself. Both are worth a deliberate answer rather than a default, particularly if your privacy notice makes a promise about retention.

Then go and look at the dashboard

For the first week, the number worth watching is not how many chats you had. It is which page they started on. A page producing far more questions than the rest is usually a page that is not explaining itself, and that is a cheaper problem to fix than answering the same question fifty times.

Last updated 22 September 2026.