Adding a personal touch to your website, such as a contact form, social media links, or an email address, can help healthily increase your conversion rates.

However, if you really want to be proactive, adding live chat functionality to your website could substantially increase your sales and significantly improve user experience on your website. 

Live chat allows you to respond to sales questions on the spot and resolve problems on the spot. This means live chat can increase your online conversions and allows you to provide outstanding customer service.

A lot of businesses see live chat functionality as a must nowadays, and you can reduce buyer friction by providing real human interaction to visitors and customers on your website. 

We chose WordPress as a platform for this article, as it’s the most popular CMS on the web, and the majority of small businesses choose WordPress to power their website.

Installing a WordPress plugin is a breeze, but choosing the correct plugin is essential and takes time to research, so we compiled a handy list of the best live chat plugins for WordPress for you.

Let’s start!

LiveChat

LiveChat is one of the most popular live chat solutions available today, and it provides integration with WordPress. It’s easy to use and has a very straightforward interface. From a customer’s standpoint, they can see a visually appealing chat box at the bottom of the page at all times. They can choose to engage with you, or you can proactively contact the visitors and improve the first contact with your business. After the session is finished, customers can provide feedback and grade the interaction with your agent. 

Here are some of the best features for LiveChat:

• Fully customizable chat window
• A single dashboard for all conversations, even if you operate the plugin on multiple websites
• A full history of previous chats
• Pre-chat and post-chat surveys
• Desktop, browser, and mobile agent apps
• 14-day free trial to test it out

Price: Paid

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Tidio Live Chat

Tidio is one of the best live chat plugins for WordPress. You just need to install and activate the plugin to be up and running. The chat window has three available design options, and you can customize colors to match your company’s branding. It is a relatively new player on the market (compared to veterans of the space), but it caught our eye as it provides pro and premium features found in other plugins for free.

Here are some of the best features for Tidio available for free:

• Three operator seats 
• Unlimited history, messages, and contacts 
• Canned responses 
• Pre-chat and post-chat surveys 
• Visitor blocking 
• Chatbot editor and templates 
• Desktop, browser, and mobile applications 
• Facebook Messenger integration 
• Customizable widget

We really like this plugin (even the free version), and you can also use additional features such as marketing automation, CRM, and email campaign creator.

Price: Free (premium version available)

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JivoChat

JivoChat is a very popular WordPress live chat plugin, and for all the right reasons. It has a free version, packed with some great features, and the look of the panel is stylish and sophisticated. Unfortunately, Jivo doesn’t offer bot automation but supports phone support software so you can use it in tandem with voice chats. Keep in mind that their logo can’t be removed from the chat widget in the free version of the plugin. To remove their branding, you’ll have to use a premium paid plan.

Here are some of the best free JivoChat features:

• Free up to 5 agents
• Unlimited chats and websites
• Facebook Messenger integration
• Desktop, browser, and mobile applications
• Two months of chat history retention
• Customizable chat in 20 languages

Price: Free (premium plan available)

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Formilla Live Chat

Even though it looks minimalistic and straightforward, Formilla Live Chat plugin is packed with features and allows advanced customization of the chat window. You can edit the default CSS directly from the Formilla interface, and upload custom images to customize the look of your chat widget. If you’re a small business with low traffic – you can try out the free package that allows one agent, one concurrent chat and up to 30 chats per month.

The free plan is quite limited, but their premium plan is affordable ($10 per month) and provides some excellent features:

• One agent
• Up to 1000 contacts
• Unlimited chats and emails
• Mobile app
• File sharing
• Real-time visitor monitoring

Price: Free (premium plans available)

Download

Drift

Drift is a live chat solution with a marketing approach in mind and has a very fresh and distinctive look and feel (some may consider it a bit over the top). The interface can be a bit confusing in some areas, considering its mostly icon-based, and these icons appear and disappear in different scenarios. One of the downsides of this application is that the free version is minimal, so you’ll need to opt for paid plans, which aren’t cheap. We also don’t like that premium features can’t be tested and trialed on the free trial version.

Here are some of the free features available on Drift live chat:

• One agent
• Up to 100 contacts
• Basic reporting
• Desktop application
• Visitor blocking
• Email fallback
• Welcome greeting
• Email signatures
• Calendar, Slack and Google Analytics integrations

Price: Free (premium plans available)

Download

Olark

Olark is a feature-packed live chat solution that can be integrated with your WordPress website using a convenient widget. You receive a code snippet from Olark, and then you can embed it anywhere on your website. You start with a free 14-day trial account where you can test all the features, and then you can issue a downgrade request to the free plan at the end of the period. One of the most exciting features is that you get a detailed breakdown of the visitor’s activity on your website in each chat conversation. It shows which pages the person visited, and what they did on those pages. 

Here are some of the best features provided by Olark live chat:

• HelpDesk integration (Zendesk, Desk.com, Groove, etc.)
• CRM integration (Highrise, Salesforce, Nutshell, etc.)
• Detailed reports – customer satisfaction, chat frequency, agent responsiveness
• White label option
• Agent groups (support and sales teams for example)
• Advanced automation (hide/show chat window rules, automated messages, routing chats to specified teams automatically)
• Searchable chat history

Keep in that Olark’s free plan only allows one agent and a maximum of 20 chats per month.

Price: Free (premium plan available)

Download

Most of these plugins offer free versions, so we encourage you to try them out, and consider boosting your sales conversions even further!