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Website chat is a chat widget on your own site. A visitor clicks it, asks a question, and the agent answers from the same knowledge, instructions and actions it uses on the phone and by email. Every conversation lands in Conversations next to your calls and emails.

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Turn it on or off

Open Agents → your agent → Channels › Website chat. The page has two tabs at the top, Widget and Install. The switch, Answer chats on your website, is just under them. Only owners and admins can change it.
  • On: the widget answers on any page that has the snippet.
  • Off: the widget stops answering. The widget key and snippet stay as they are, so you can leave the embed on your site and switch chat back on later without touching it. If you want the widget gone from your pages, remove the snippet.
Whether it’s on or off, the Widget tab has:
  • On your site: whether the widget is live on your site yet, with a button to Install (Install it until it is, Install settings after).
  • The widget: the chat widget’s settings in Content, Style and Launcher tabs, with a live preview beside them. See customise the chat widget.
  • Instructions: wording that applies to chat only.
The Install tab, Channels › Website chat › Install, has the embed snippet, the install check, platform guides, the JavaScript API, Allowed domains and Verified visitors. See install the widget.
The setup checklist marks chat as done the first time the widget loads on a page that isn’t wiredesk.ai. The live preview on Channels › Website chat and Preview chats don’t count, so open your own site once after installing.

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Put it on your site

The snippet is one <script> tag. Install the widget has the steps for each platform and the per-page options. Before you go live, lock the widget to your domains so a copy of your snippet doesn’t work on someone else’s site. To change how the widget looks and what it says before anyone types, use the Widget tab on Channels › Website chat. See customise the chat widget.

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What visitors get

A launcher in the corner of the page. Clicking it opens a panel with:
  • Your header name, icon and tagline.
  • The widget’s Opening message, set in the Content tab on Channels › Website chat. If you leave it empty, the chat opens with “Hi! How can I help you today?”. It never uses the phone greeting.
  • Up to five suggested questions, shown until the visitor sends something.
  • A message box. A message can be up to 2,000 characters; anything longer is cut off.
Replies can use line breaks, bold and bullet lists, which the panel renders. The panel’s menu has three options: If the visitor asks for a person and A person in chat & email is on, on Handoff, someone on your team can take the conversation over from the dashboard. The agent stays quiet while they do. See handoff.

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How conversations are kept

The widget remembers the visitor in their browser’s local storage, so the same visitor keeps the same conversation across page loads, reloads and tabs.
  • Resuming: a conversation stays open for 24 hours after the last message. Come back within a day and it’s still there; after that the visitor starts fresh, and the old one is still in View recent chats.
  • Closing: a chat with no activity for 30 minutes is closed on our side and summarised for your dashboard. If the visitor comes back to it within the day, it reopens.
  • Moving between pages: whether the panel is open is kept per tab, so clicking through your site doesn’t close a conversation in progress.
  • Private browsing: if the browser won’t let the widget store anything, chat still works, but the conversation won’t survive a reload.
For signed-in users, verified visitors ties conversations to the person rather than the browser.

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Limits visitors might hit

Sending too fast. To stop scripts from running up your bill through a public widget key, each widget allows about 30 requests a minute per visitor, and separately per network address. Sending messages, checking for new replies, loading recent chats, ending a chat and rating an answer all count. A visitor over the limit sees “You’re sending messages too quickly. Give it a moment.” and can carry on after a minute. People typing normally don’t get near it. Several visitors behind one shared connection, such as an office network, share the per-address allowance. Spend cap reached. When your workspace reaches its spend cap, the agent stops answering and visitors see: “Sorry — this assistant is temporarily unavailable. Please reach the business directly.” Their messages are still saved in Conversations. Message limit reached. If you set a message limit, a conversation past it gets a fixed reply that points the visitor to Start a new chat. That reply isn’t billed. A failed reply. If the agent can’t produce a reply, the visitor sees “the agent had trouble replying — try again”. Their message is already saved. Chat is off. The widget doesn’t answer. See turn it on or off.

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What it costs

Each agent reply in chat counts as one reply of usage. Messages your team writes don’t count. Chats in Preview, and in the live preview on Channels › Website chat while chat is on, are real conversations: they appear in Conversations and count like any other reply. See plans and limits.