Speed Testing the 10 Best WordPress Chat Plugins
Today we are going to do a little research into the top 10 WordPress chat plugins. You see these top 10 WordPress lists alllll the time, I mean I know I do so I assume you do as well.
Even if you have never seen one of these lists before I want to share this test with you. This comes from a recent set of aggravations from dealing with a "reputable" company.
There are tons of these "top 10 great plugins" for your website. My question is, "are they really? Are these plugins truly as great as they say they are?"
If a plugin is legitimately great today it has to pass one simple test more than any other test (excluding security but that is a whole other story).
The test that it needs to pass is simple enough, a speed test!
Will adding a WordPress chat plugin to your site slow it down?
Yes, but usually by less than a second. In our 2021 tests on our own server, the homepage loaded in 723 ms with no chat plugin. JivoChat added almost nothing, Tidio, Tawk.to and Chaty added under 0.4 seconds, and Crisp and LiveChat added close to a full second. Shared hosting may see bigger slowdowns.
Here is how we tested it, in our search for the fastest WordPress chat plugins.
Here are the list of plugins we are going to add and test on the website you are currently reading.
How the test will work is that I will find our baseline page speed using Pingdom. I will install the plugin. Then I will test the page speed on my homepage, next I will test the page speed on a blog post.
So lets get to it!
Here are our baseline page speed tests:
Homepage Baseline
Blog Post Baseline
Now before I move into the test results I want to tell you I was surprised by the results on each of these. Two or so years ago I ran these exact same tests and the page speed was wildly different than the test results this time. Most options then added a 5+ second page speed time, so I expected to see that same thing with this list.
Also, as you will see in the results below, I took screen shots from each one of the tests. I did it this way so that you could see not only the page speed, but also how much it added to the page (for those of you wanting to get super technical).
Tawk.To Live Chat
Tawk.To Live Chat
Zendesk Chat
Zendesk Chat
3CX Live Chat
Well this is embarrassing.... (for them) I could not get this one to work with my site. I could get it to work on a single page, but it wasn't a page I was using for the test, so after about 2 hours I gave up. Now I could have spent time going back and forth with their support to resolve the issue, but lets be honest, do you really have time to do that with your site? If I can't get something working after I have setup an account, then it is probably going to be an issue for myself, my clients and you. So shall we move on?
3CX Live Chat
HubSpot
HubSpot
Tidio
Tidio
JivoChat
JivoChat
Crisp
Crisp
LiveChat
LiveChat
Live Chat by Formilla
Live Chat by Formilla
Floating Chat Widget (aka Chaty)
Ok, so I must note that Chaty is not a true live chat plugin, it allows multiple ways to contact you via your “chat” button. For the test, I chose "Form & Call", just so I could get a baseline reading. However, a plugin like this would be great for someone who didn’t want one more thing to check (aka most small business owners). It has a ton of integrations in the paid plan and would be worth looking at if you don’t have a dedicated customer service team.
Floating Chat Widget (aka Chaty)
Wrap up time!
Can you see how close each of these were? Ultimately I decided to go with Tidio because of the speed, plus it has a phone app. The most important feature for me being that I am not tied to my computer in order to help someone, right behind speed that is.
At the end of the day I must add this tidbit of information, I only ran these tests on my site which is on my server. So if you are on a shared hosting plan, then you may have different speed results than I did.
So my suggestion would be to pick the top 3 you think may work for you and test each of them on your site. If you run into any issues, feel free to reach out! You can even use our new chat plugin! (You see what I did there?)
TL;DR - I tested 10 WordPress chat plugins for speed results and found Tidio to be the fastest one that meets my needs, plus it has a phone app. Pick 3 for yourself and test each of them. Chat with us if you have any issues, or compare our WordPress support plans. Table below for faster reading & sorting:
Homepage Tests
| Plugin | Load Time | Perf. Grade | Page Size | Requests |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| None | 723 ms | 67 | 2.7 MB | 96 |
| Tawk.to | 1.09 s | 67 | 2.7 MB | 99 |
| Zendesk Chat | 1.25 s | 67 | 3.3 MB | 109 |
| 3CX Live Chat | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Hubspot | 1.5 s | 65 | 3.1 MB | 114 |
| Tidio | 1.07 s | 67 | 3.0 MB | 102 |
| Jivochat | 760 ms | 67 | 3.1 MB | 104 |
| Crisp | 1.62 s | 67 | 2.8 MB | 102 |
| LiveChat | 1.68 s | 67 | 3.0 MB | 110 |
| Live Chat by Formilla | 1.11 s | 66 | 2.9 MB | 109 |
| Chaty | 1.1 s | 67 | 2.7 MB | 98 |
Blog Post Tests
| Plugin | Load Time | Perf. Grade | Page Size | Requests |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| None | 833 ms | 67 | 1.7 MB | 96 |
| Tawk.to | 917 ms | 67 | 1.6 MB | 96 |
| Zendesk Chat | 829 ms | 66 | 2.2 MB | 104 |
| 3CX Live Chat | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Hubspot | 1.34 s | 64 | 2.0 MB | 109 |
| Tidio | 794 ms | 66 | 1.9 MB | 97 |
| Jivochat | 1.04 s | 66 | 2.0 MB | 100 |
| Crisp | 1.46 s | 66 | 1.8 MB | 97 |
| LiveChat | 1.19 s | 66 | 2.6 MB | 105 |
| Live Chat by Formilla | 752 ms | 66 | 1.8 MB | 104 |
| Chaty | 902 ms | 67 | 2.9 MB | 94 |
