drift

Your site should load in 3 seconds … according to Google. This plugin alone will take more than that. It adds so many requests its ridiculous. The average page has about 75 requests … now thats not the best thats average. This plugin makes 33 requests, so by itself … half of the total requests would be drift on the average page. And it cant even add them from one consistent domain, requiring DNS lookups over about 8 subdomains. So not only does someone computer need to ask for 33 files they have to look up where the file is 8 times. I mean … 33 requests over 8 subdomains for just a chat box? Youll also note that they dont even consistently offer Gzip compression across all those servers, thats really dumb. customer.api.drift.com: 3 components, 1.4K (2.3K GZip) metrics.api.drift.com: 3 components, 0.07K (1.5K GZip) targeting.api.drift.com: 3 components, 0.4K (1.8K GZip) enrichment.api.drift.com: 1 component, 0.02K (0.5K GZip) presence.api.drift.com: 1 component, 0.3K event.api.drift.com: 1 component, 0.8K 1165458-8.chat.api.drift.com: 1 component, 0.3K js.driftt.com: 20 components, 1702.6K (459.1K GZip) This solution kills your ability to rank well. It doesn’t even have to be this way, the plugin is just that sloppy. I can combine and minify and optimize the heck out of the site I have control over but I can’t fix these issues that aren’t on the client server. This could be delivered all in the plugin requiring no extenal requests at all, or it could be all combined and served from one js, one css file both on the same server running Gzip. But that isn’t how this is done.

Good, but free version is very limited

Drift has a lot going for it, but it fails terribly in that… the iOS app NEVER gives you notifications of a chat. They have some type of latency issue. I consistently missed chats for hours, and only saw them because I kept manually checking. I’ve even checked the app and seen no new messages before, then checked again later and noticed the timestamp was BEFORE the last time I checked. Unfortunately, despite what’s good about Drift… if it doesn’t work, it’s not chat. They might as well be emailing me… don’t waste your time. Hopefully, they’ll fix this issue soon.

best one out there so far – like it a lot ??

Very good, working async, so it does not put too much load. I have few future requests: Option to choose on what pages Drift widget is shown. Individual pages, or post types. Option to show widget only to logged in users. Thank you.

Website live chat that you can use to convert leads.