FlexyTalk & WPML

When your page loads,without initiating a chat session, the plugin downloads only a few files, most of them images for your chat toolbar. The chat toolbar can be fully customized as it is only html with html5 DATA attribute (like a key value pair). The chat toolbar can be just a plain link if you want. Without this images the number of files downloaded is very low.

The css for the chat widget theme is required also on each page download, this is a css built with jquery theme roller. This can be customized by you and may be combined with you own css.

When a chat initiate, this is another story but I still consider it lightweight for the comparisons I made with some other live chat solutions, being them between 2X and 10X times heavier than flexy.

It should not make requests to gravatar if it is not enabled… I’ll check that.

You have to do your own translation on the chat toolbar. The toolbar will display the messages in the KEY-VALUE withing the widget code. I don’t know how your multi language plugin works, but maybe you will have to get rid of the flexytalk plugin and get this translation plugin to translate the values, and then output the flexytalk html code in the desired language.

It is not possible yet, to have the widget in different languages. This is something that will be released in the future.

Hello,

Please take a look a these page load checks, done with Pingdom Tools.

Website homepage with FlexyTalk deactivated:

https://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/OdX4bJA5t/https://www.vovone.com

Website homepage with FlexyTalk activated:

https://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/OtlxPEQU1/https://www.vovone.com

As you can see, there are not just a few files downloaded with our install. There are really quite some requests, even one with a shortURL redirect?

As for the multilingual part, you might contact the guys @ WPML, they have great support and are very helpful to other developers to get plugins compatible with their translation system.

As for the FlexyTalk functionality itself, I can only say it just work great! I really hope we can easily achieve a better ‘lightweight’ front end ‘idle’ integration when no chat is activated, since that puts quite a unnecessary load on each page request right now.

the shortURL was added for insights purposes just for a couple of days. Now I deleted it and seems much faster now in the test tool.

The default widget mode is inline, meaning that all files to build the widget are downloaded from the beginning. There’s a “popup” mode which is uglier but lighter.

Please note that the test tool you use always gives different results for each test. I sometimes even get that the flexytalk version is lighter than the other ??

Make the same test with some other popular live chats and you’ll see why I call it lighweight.

??

regards

Sebastian.

Hi Sebastian,

I call it also lightweight, since we _did_ test many other clients and solutions! What I tried to achieve is to make it ‘even more’ (really) lightweight ??

Please remind I’m not referring to ‘how fast the page loads’ with the tool link I gave you. It’s just a tool that shows nicely how many requests are made when loading a page, aka how ‘heavy’ a page is. What I tried to show is that our ‘full-blown’ page has 48 Requests without FlexyTalk activated, achieved by combining CSS, combining Java, using Sprite Images, lazy loads, etc., all to make the elements/requests that are initially loaded on each page (header/footer, etc.) are as low as possible.

With the FlexyTalk client activated, the requests raise from 48 to 60, which is 12 requests more for just one added functionality. And looking at the elements loaded for FlexyTalk, this can be optimized with some widely available techniques.

One of the things that you could do, is make a lazy load, starting with only loading the bare needed elements (preferably combined and with sprite images) to only show the ‘Chat/3D Icon’, and lazy-load all the functionality needed to connect to the backend as soon as you ‘mouse over’ the ‘Click To Chat’ element. There will nothing change functional really, since you don’t change the Icon/Chat part right now ‘live’ to show ‘agent’ availability upfront. (Which is a good thing is this case).

Look for instance @ our Facebook/Twitter/Google+ buttons below each Page/Post. Those things are also quite ‘heavy’ calls when you embed them into your pages, raising the page elements and (API) requests a lot, while many users don’t care about these buttons and don’t use them. Right now they are ‘static icons’ that gets activate on mouse over, so only then all the FB, Twitter, Google api calls/requests get executed.

It’s not nitpicking I’m doing. We just like to comply with the ‘Page Speed’ initiatives where for instance Google is part of too. Making internet connections faster is one thing, making Web Applications/Pages ‘more economic’ is the other thing!

And also think of this: Making the plugin ‘lazy load’ will also reduce the calls to your API servers significant, eliminating all the call from people’s page-loads that doesn’t want to use the chat, so it is a win-win situation.

Bottom line, to make it clear; I’m convinced the FlexyTalk is lightweight in perspective you refer to, but I hope you understand my reasoning too ??

If you want to discuss this outside the forums, please send me a PM, we can maybe help you with some ideas and experiences, testing and even code contributions.

– Casper

Thanks Casper for your great tips.

Lazy loading is a win-win situation but it delays the widget display after clicking the toolbar, and for the other 99% of people that are not page-speed minded , this is bad.

Anyway, I’m sure we can combine some js and css and save 2 or 3 request. I’ll let you know when we do it.

Of course I understand your reasoning, and I agree but most people don’t care about it, because, at the human perception (not at a testing tool) everything happens async and there’s no difference, and if you do lazy loading, it becomes “slow and unresponsive”

Hello Sebastian,

Great if you find some optimizations.

And yes, I’m already very happy that the plugin is working async! But I wonder if lazy-load makes things less responsive compared to async. I even think it’s the opposite way: Right now it takes a bit before the async ‘Chat Now’ button (which is the initial trigger for the visitor) is shown, and with lazy-load it will be shown faster/instantly, thus ‘more responsive’. People won’t mind that much anymore if it takes a bit longer when they decided to click the button, as long as you show some ‘in progress’ image or such. It’s all psychological, I know, but it’s a proven fact :).

Anyway, we are strongly thinking about getting the paid version of FlexyTalk, but we for sure will prefer the client with lazy-load, not page-speed minded, but for the reasoning given above (which also helps the page-speed and satisfies Google even more for the PageRank ?? )

– Casper