
5+ Best WordPress Live Chat Plugins for Customer Service
Live chat is an amazing tool with innumerable possibilities, and yet many websites don’t use it. WordPress live chat plugins are incredibly easy to use and they always prove to be a worthy ally to any support, help or sales site. While live chat is definitely a must for help and support websites, it’s also a feature that pretty much any website could benefit from.
Let’s take a quick look at some of the reasons why you should install live chat on your website and then we’ll check out some of the best WordPress live chat plugins. If you’re using WordPress community themes, you may already have some of these functionalities at your disposal.
Benefits of Using Live Chat
Specifically, it’s good for post-launch research, when your website has been live for quite some time and you already have plenty of visitors. You did your research beforehand, you set up a great website, but now you want to see if the information you gathered was valid and if it still applies. More importantly, you want to know if your visitors and/or customers are doing what you want them to do. One sure way to find that out is to engage with them through live chat and basically observe their behavior. Oftentimes, a lot of great insights are gathered this way.
The ultimate goal of every business website is to improve sales and conversions. That’s basically what we are all here for. In many cases, a customer will need a little extra push. Perhaps there’s a question that needs to be answered regarding a product or service, and that’s why you need live chat. When there’s someone who can instantly talk the customer through whatever issues, the chance of conversion becomes higher.
Personalized user experience is one of the hottest trends right now, and for a good reason. Everyone enjoys feeling like what they’re being served on a site has been tailored just for them. Live chat is one of the things that can be of tremendous assistance here. For instance, support staff can do a better job at providing assistance if they draw on the user’s history of interactions with the site. This is precisely the kind of insight that can help with personalization. And, with personalized support, customer loyalty is virtually limitless.
With the best solutions, like the WordPress live chat plugins we will talk about later, you can set working hours for your live chat help and support. Customers reaching out after those hours will have to leave an email so that the support staff can get back to them. This is, obviously, a great way to collect emails and generate leads and an excellent supplement to your email signup forms.
Website visitors love having the possibility to talk to a real person. It doesn’t really matter what industry or niche your website belongs to. Although this is obviously true, a surprising number of websites doesn’t use live chat. Customers will prefer your site to a similar one that doesn’t have live chat. Simple as that.
People are less likely to buy things from people or services they don’t know or aren’t familiar with. This is one of the few things where physical retail stores have an advantage over ecommerce sites. With live chat, you can override this problem by providing that “human touch” and building trust between your business and your customers.
Ever wondered where do all those angry negative reviews on the web come from? Well, a majority actually comes from people who had a complaint or a question on a website but didn’t have a support staff member to complain to. Sure, they could’ve written an email or phoned in, but who has the patience for that these days? Live chat is fast and immediate, so people prefer it to other methods of getting in touch. With live chat, you can control the conversation and actually keep the negative feedback from “leaking” all over the web.
Now that we’ve seen why you need live chat on your website, let’s see how to add it.
Best WordPress Live Chat Plugins
Like we said, there are plenty of plugins that you can use to add live chat to your site, but these are, hands down, the best on the market right now:

Tidio is an excellent solution for small businesses who still have to mind the budget and don’t have a massive support staff. This is a scalable option that works perfectly fine even in the free version. It allows for a smooth live chat experience with your visitors and customers and it’s very easy to install and use.
Tidio offers plenty of useful options. For instance, it can email your visitors when they leave the chat, keep track of visits, and keep all your channels in one place, with live chat, Messenger and email in a single window.
Tidio integrates with a number of services, from Zendesk and MailChimp to SalesForce and GetResponse. It’s also highly customizable. You can set the color scheme so that it doesn’t stand out from your website style.

This WordPress live chat plugin is a major customer favorite, thanks partially to the fact it is completely free and “will always be.” It has over 100,000 active installations and the number keeps growing.
Tawk.To is a simple solution that can provide essential assistance to small and medium businesses in need of a live chat. The plugin helps you stay in touch with your visitors even on mobile, thanks to native apps developed for all major mobile platforms.
It is a simple yet efficient solution, without too many fancy features. It allows for plenty of customization, from color and position to the content itself. In addition, it includes attention-grabbing bubbles and comes in 27 different languages.

Stay in contact with your customers and assist them like a professional with Chaty – a powerful WordPress Chat plugin that allows you to chat with your website visitors via their favorite messaging channels. Thanks to this amazing tool you will get more leads and calls that can end up in more sales and more loyal customers. As a result, your customer support will be improved. Thus, your customers will be more satisfied with your services. In a nutshell, a free Chaty version lets your customers choose between chat 25 communication channels including Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, Slack, and many others. However, the free version allows you to show up to 2 different icons to chat channels. Just display the chat button of the desired channel and start the communication. To attract the attention and engage your website visitors to contact you via chat, you can customize your chat widget by choosing from 8 stunning attention effects including bounce, waggle, sheen, spin, fade, shockwave, blink, and pulse. Also, you can set the widget’s location and define when it will appear for the first time.
In case all of this isn’t enough, you can switch to Chaty PRO. This WordPress chat plugin version allows you to display different chat channels for different pages which is great if you want to show separate widgets for different products on your website. You can, as well, show the widget only on your opening days or hide it when you’re closed. Apart from this, you can display a phone icon and let your visitors click to call you. On top of this, Chaty PRO offers tons of additional options including page targeting, country targeting, Google Analytics, widget, and channel customization, and more.
Lastly, you can test Chaty’s features and functionalities before you decide to purchase.

ProProfs Chat is a live chat plugin built upon a SaaS model that caters to businesses of all sorts and sizes. With the plugin, you can easily gain valuable customer insights, grow your business by capturing leads, and just be there for your clients and customers whenever they might need you.
ProProfs Chat has lots of features that make it an interesting choice among chat plugins. It has its own theme, for example, so you can easily customize how the chat window looks. It offers chat routing, greetings, canned responses, as well as analytics and reports – every type of function you or your clients might need in a chat plugin.
The list of features doesn’t end there, of course – you can use pre- and post-chat forms, monitor visitors, set up announcements, and do many more things. The service is offered on a subscription model which starts at $20 a month.

Formilla is a terrific live chat solution that comes in both the free and the premium version. It has excellent ratings and over 8,000 active installations. One of the things that make Formilla so popular is the fact it offers a complete solution for mobile devices, with apps for all major mobile platforms and a specially designed mobile-ready chat widget.
Also, with Formilla, you get real-time monitoring of visitors. You can see how many people are on your site at any given moment and initiate chats with them. You can also view their data, such as the country, the operating system they’re using, and so on. Proactive chat feature initiates the chat after a visitor has spent a certain amount of time on the site, and you can also use canned or saved replies to quickly send out default answers to the most common questions.
The list of features is quite long but bear in mind that many of them only come with the premium version.

LiveChat is one of the oldest WordPress-specific live chat plugins for help and support. It has been getting excellent reviews since the beginning and by now has well over 20,000 active installations.
In addition to the usual live chat functionalities, it also comes with a built-in ticketing system for small to medium support and help sites. The way it works is that during working hours visitors can engage in live chat with the support staff. After that time, the chat automatically converts into a ticket form.
LiveChat also includes a set of proactive chat features. For instance, chat invitations allow operators to send personalized messages that appear to be based on specific criteria, which is a great way to establish trust and loyalty with your visitors.
Note that LiveChat, as a plugin, is free but in order to use it, you have to have a LiveChat subscription, which is not free and comes in several pricing plans.

This free plugin is probably the most cost-effective among live chat plugins for help and support. The plugin has a premium version but, to be completely honest, most small and medium businesses will do just fine with the free version.
3CX Live Chat allows you to have an unlimited number of simultaneous live chats, store offline messages and customize the plugin to fit your most specific needs. For instance, you can change the colors of the chat box, edit all text fields, use animations, and so on. The plugin is fully responsive and your visitors can drag it around their page.
WP Live Chat Support is compatible with Google Analytics, translation plugins, GIF and many more. It basically has everything a beginner website or a small business might need when it comes to live chat customer support and help.
Final Thoughts
Live chat is, without a doubt, a feature that any business website should definitely have. Not offering your visitors the ability to reach out instantly to your support staff is a major minus and something that may make them turn to your competition instead. Live chat is essential for lead generation, for boosting sales and building brand trust.
Live chat plugins for help and support that we included in this short list have absolutely everything you need in terms of features, reliability and ease of use. The only thing for you to do is see which one meets your needs and your budget the best. Now get out there and start reaching out to your visitors, and don’t forget to let us know how it goes!
We hope that you found this article to be helpful. If you liked it, please feel free to check out some of these articles as well!