As always, there are several ways to accomplish the adding of chat to your WordPress site. I went to wpbeginner.com for an article on the best chat plugins. The article is called 8 Best WordPress Chat Plugins (Expert Pick). Each has their pros and cons. I decided to try HubSpot. I only wanted the chat feature. Simple. HubSpot has a lot of CRM features that I don’t need now. This site is a FREE educational site so I don’t have customers and a huge list of contacts either. I just wanted to ability to test how chat works. I got another computer and went to this site and at the bottom right of the page the little chat box and icon appeared after I went through the setup.
How did I set this up? First I created and account. There is a wizard that is fairly easy to navigate. Then I had an account. Next I installed the plugin HubSpot All-In-One Marketing. It’s free. To unlock all of the features you need to pay. If you are like me, you don’t need to pay. After I installed the plugin on this WordPress website, I got a message saying looks like you are already using HubSpot. That’s good. It went to the HubSpot website (https://app.hubspot.com/) and found I had already created an account.
I needed to navigate through the website to set up the chat. I’m sorry I don’t have all the steps as I didn’t document them. It wasn’t too hard.
There is an option to import your contacts but I added only one email, my extra email, that I could use to simulate a conversation on two computers and it worked. This really is just a test. As the host, I just need to be on the plugin’s website to respond to the anonymous visitor to this website.
As the website administrator, how do you get to your chat inbox? That’s easy once everything is set up. In the WordPress Dashboard, find HubSpot then click on Live Chat. A browser tab will open and you will see your live chats!