Every agency knows this story. A client’s website gets steady traffic, the contact form gets a handful of enquiries a week, and nobody can explain the gap between the two. People arrive with a question, cannot find the answer, and leave without saying anything.
That gap is why we switched on live chat for marqira.com. We did it with WPCentrify, so a disclosure first: WPCentrify is our own WordPress management platform. This is not an independent review of a WordPress live chat plugin. It is an account of why we added chat, how we set it up and what changed, written so you can decide whether the same approach suits your site.
Why a contact form is not enough
A contact form asks a visitor to do a lot before they get anything back. They have to decide their question is worth an email, write it out, hand over their details and then wait, often without knowing how long for. Plenty of people with a perfectly good enquiry will not bother.
The questions that stop people are usually small:
- Do you work with businesses like mine, or in my country?
- Can you take over a site someone else built?
- Is this the kind of project you would quote for?
- What happens after I send the form?
None of these justify a formal enquiry, and all of them can end a visit if they go unanswered. Live chat lowers the effort to almost nothing. A visitor can ask one line, get one line back and carry on, and many of those short conversations turn into proper enquiries.
Chat does not replace the form
A form is still the right tool for detailed briefs, attachments and people who prefer to write things down properly. Chat sits alongside it for the quick questions. The goal is to stop losing the visitors who were never going to fill in a form at all.
Setting up live chat on a WordPress site
What to look for in a WordPress live chat plugin
Before we chose anything, we wrote down what a chat tool would have to do for us, as an agency that also looks after other people’s WordPress sites:
- Light on the page. A chat widget loads on every page, so a heavy one slows down the whole site. Slow sites lose visitors and fail Google’s Core Web Vitals.
- Every conversation kept. A chat that disappears when the browser closes is a lost lead. Each conversation needs to be stored, with the visitor’s details, so someone can follow it up.
- One place to answer from. If you run several sites, logging into a separate chat inbox for each one does not last.
- Sensible out-of-hours behavior. Nobody is online all the time, so the widget has to collect contact details when you are away.
- Privacy handled. Chat collects personal data, so it should sit within your cookie consent and privacy policy.
That list is a fair test for any live chat tool, not only ours.
How we set it up
WPCentrify works through a small connector plugin on each WordPress site. The connector uses a scoped key rather than an admin password, can be deactivated from WordPress at any time, and leaves the site on its existing host. Once a site is connected, its tools are managed from the WPCentrify dashboard, and live chat is one of them.
Our set-up came down to a handful of decisions:
- Where the widget appears. On pages where people are weighing up whether to get in touch, such as services, pricing questions and case studies, a chat is helpful. On a long article it can be a distraction.
- Who answers. We agreed who on the team picks up chats, and during which hours.
- What happens when nobody is available. The conversation is still saved as a lead, so we can reply as soon as someone is back.
- How it fits with consent. WPCentrify also handles cookie consent, which keeps the chat and the consent banner managed in the same place.
WPCentrify also includes an AI chatbot that answers visitor questions from your own content. It is a separate tool, and worth considering if your questions repeat and your content already answers them. We chose to start with people answering, so we could learn what visitors actually ask before automating any of it.
Check your speed before and after
Whatever chat tool you use, test a key page in PageSpeed Insights before you switch the widget on and again afterwards. Look at Largest Contentful Paint and Interaction to Next Paint in particular. Our Core Web Vitals guide explains what those numbers mean.
What changed for us
One desk for every website
The biggest change was operational. Chats from marqira.com arrive in the same WPCentrify dashboard we already use to manage client sites, alongside uptime, updates and security alerts. There is no extra inbox to remember, and the same approach extends to any client site we switch chat on for. For an agency, that is the difference between a tool that gets used and one that quietly gets ignored.
Every chat saved as a lead
Every conversation is stored as a lead, together with the contact-form leads WPCentrify already collects. A chat that starts on a Sunday evening is still there on Monday morning with the visitor’s details attached, so nothing depends on someone happening to be online at the right moment.
Barely any cost to page speed
We were most wary of speed, because we spend a lot of time telling clients to remove heavy third-party scripts. On marqira.com, switching the chat on cost barely anything in page speed, which is what made it acceptable on our own site.
The numbers
We would rather show figures than adjectives here: [[NEEDS: chats and leads received on marqira.com since live chat was switched on, if MarQira wants to publish them]]
What it asks of us
Live chat creates work as well as leads. Someone has to answer, and the experience is only good if replies come quickly during the hours you say you are available. We also learned to keep a short set of answers ready for the questions that come up most, which doubles as a list of things our pages should explain better.
Our verdict
Because we make WPCentrify, our verdict is not neutral, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. With that in mind, here is where we landed.
Live chat is worth it if your site gets steady traffic but fewer enquiries than you would expect, if your visitors have short questions that decide whether they get in touch, and if someone can answer during the hours you advertise.
It is not worth it yet if nobody can reply for days, or if your contact page and service pages do not answer the basics. Fix those first; chat will not cover for missing information.
WPCentrify’s live chat suits us because it meets the test we set: it is light on the page, it keeps every conversation as a lead, and it puts chat in the same dashboard as everything else we do for the sites we manage. If you already run your sites on WPCentrify, switching it on is a small step.
For agencies running client sites
Website live chat for agencies has a particular problem: every client wants it, and nobody wants to manage ten separate chat accounts with ten different logins and ten widgets to keep updated. Before you switch chat on for a client, agree who answers it. Some clients want to reply themselves; others want the conversations passed on as leads. Either way, put the decision in writing, include chat in the monthly report, and check the client’s page speed before and after. Done that way, chat becomes part of the care plan rather than one more thing to look after.
If you would like to see how the platform fits together, our WPCentrify page explains how we run client sites on it. If you would rather have chat, updates, backups and monitoring handled for you, that is what our WordPress management service does. And if chat leads should flow straight into your CRM, our small business automation ideas show how. More practical guides are on the MarQira blog.