How to Add Live Chat to Your WordPress Website
WordPress is the biggest blogging platform in the world, and it’s grown to encompass dozens of helpful apps and plugins to enhance your experience as a blogger. One of the most popular and versatile is WPSC, the WordPress Suite Career Page. With WPSC, you can put a career page on your WordPress site to highlight your work history and connect with audiences interested in your line of work. But for some businesses, even a WordPress site isn’t enough. They need a more engaging experience for their customers. Enter: live chat!
Adding live chat to your site is a lot easier than you’d think. In this article, you’ll learn three easy steps to getting live chat working on your WordPress site.
Step 1: Install & Configure the Right Plugins
Installing & Configuring plugins is one of the simplest and most effective ways to enhance your WordPress experience. To add live chat to your site, you’ll need to install the WPSC Chat plugin along with the Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin (free).
Once installed, you’ll need to configure the WPSC Chat plugin to work with your WordPress site. This is easily done through the WordPress admin area. From there, navigate to the plugin’s settings and configure the following options:
- Enable live chat
- Show the Google chat button
- Show the Discord chat button
- Enter text color
- Enter background color
- Choose a logo (optional)
- Choose a header (optional)
- Enter the max messages
- Visibility of the text box
- Size of the text box
- Cursor style (optional)
Step 2: Create Chats & Manage Them Manually
After you have your plugins installed and configured, you’ll want to create a few chats to try out. Once you’ve gotten the hang of things, you can start to add more advanced features like scheduling, moderation, and reporting.
To create a chat, navigate to the WordPress admin area and click the blue + icon next to the ‘Discussion’ area. This will open the ‘Discussion’ modal and you’ll see a brief form where you can enter the details of the chat. Name the chat, enter a description, and select the blogs you’d like the chat to be visible on (you can select multiple blogs).
Once you’ve created the chat, you can begin entering messages. You can also add a voice note to the chat to have a more personal touch. You can find the voice note icon on the right-hand side of the chat entry form.
Managing your chats manually can be slightly tricky. To make matters easier, you can create a task list to keep track of all the chats you’ve created and the action items you’ve assigned to them. Looking for a task list plugin? Try out WPSC Task List.
Step 3: Automate Most Of The Tasks
Now that you’ve got your live chat set up and working, it’s time to automate most of the tasks so you can focus on other things. Fortunately for you, our automation lover Andy is here to take care of all the hard work for you. To begin, click the gear icon in the top right corner of the WordPress admin area and select Settings.
From there, click on the ‘Automation’ option and you’ll be taken to an expanded list of options where you can control which tasks are automated and how they operate.
You can control whether a task is automated or manual and whether it’s active (triggers actions) or inactive (no actions). For instance, you can have the scheduling of the chats be automated but you can still log in and manage them manually if you prefer. You can configure this option as you see fit and it’s something to consider if you’re looking to grow your business.
Back to our example: we want to have the scheduling of the chats be automated so we can focus on other things. First, let’s activate the ‘WPSC Scheduling’ plugin (free).
Once installed, you’ll see a green checkmark by the plugin’s name in the admin bar at the top of your WordPress site. You can now visit the WPSC dashboard to manage your schedules. On the left side of the dashboard, you’ll see a list of upcoming chats with a green checkmark next to each one. To schedule a chat, click on the date and time of the desired date and time and the chat will be added to your list.
You can see how easy this is and how much more you can do with a little bit of automation.
Don’t forget about the power of automation when you’re thinking about growing your business. Having the ability to run tasks on a schedule can be a great way to maximize efficiency and gain an advantage over your competitors who have to manually handle their tasks. For example, if you’re running a baking business and you know that most bakers work best in the morning, you can set up a task to send out the weekly orders in the morning. This saves you from having to do it later, when your day is already filled and you’re overwhelmed.
The great thing about automation is that it allows you to take care of the little things that often get neglected due to other responsibilities. You can set up a task to send out a press release once a month, or you can set up a recurring calendar event to send out a summary of the top posts on your blog every quarter. These are the things that often get pushed to the bottom of the to-do list and they can easily be handled by a plugin.
Ensure that all the tasks you set up are being performed as expected and that you’re not missing any information that could be required. You can easily review any outstanding tasks in the WordPress dashboard or via email.