Removing the widget temporarily

Sometimes you want the chat window gone for a bit: you are short-staffed for a week, it is Christmas, or you are about to do something to the site and would rather not be answering questions during it.

Pausing a website

Settings → Websites → your site, and switch the widget off.

The launcher stops appearing for visitors straight away. The snippet stays on your pages and you do not have to deploy anything, which is the whole point: turning chat back on is one switch rather than a release.

Existing conversations are not touched. Nothing is deleted and nothing is closed.

Pausing is not the same as closing for the day

If you only mean “we are not here right now”, use opening hours instead. Hours keep the widget on the page and tell people when you will be back, taking an email address in the meantime. Pausing removes it entirely, so a visitor with a question has nowhere to put it.

Use hours for the evening. Use pause for the fortnight.

The slower ways

Both of these work, and both need a deploy:

• Take the domain off the allowlist. The widget stops loading there, for the same reason it would if you had never added it. Blunt, and it looks identical to the widget being broken, which makes it a poor thing to do to a colleague.
• Remove the snippet. The honest version of the above, and the right one if you are removing chat for good rather than for a while.

What visitors see

Nothing. There is no launcher and no message explaining its absence, which is usually what you want: a chat window that appears to say it is unavailable invites people to wait for it.

If you would rather they had another route while chat is off, put the address you want them to use somewhere they will look, such as the contact page.

Last updated 22 September 2026.