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Does Having Chat on your Website Affect Your Website Speed


So... your website speed is slow and someone (maybe your manager? maybe an SEO specialist?) has suggested it’s your chat widget that is the cause. We are here to break this down, debunk any myths, help you solve the problem and make you a Website Speed hero.  

Does Website Speed affect SEO? 

First of all, let’s talk about Site speed and SEO. Yes, slow site speed can impact your SEO ranking. However, it is not the only factor. Keywords, content, content formatting, backlinking, quality of content, ads, mobile responsiveness and technical SEO all have more or equal bearing on your Domain Authority or SEO Ranking than just site speed.   

What can affect your Website Speed  

If you’ve ran a Google Page Speed Test or spoken with an expert and site speed is your issue, here are some of the key items that can impact that:  

  • Image amount and image size. This can be a big issue with websites that are image-heavy (automotive dealerships and e-commerce sites often suffer from this issue). Images can be optimized for site speed 
  • Website size (how many pages, how big are those pages) 
  • Website hosting package size. This is very important if either of the issues above are relevant to you. If you increase your hosting package it can allow you to have more pages and images 
  • Too many website plugins. This is especially important if you use Wordpress. While Wordpress allows you to customize your site through plugins, many are heavy or interact with other plugins causing slowdowns and issues in general  
  • Website builder (Autotrader? e-dealer? Shopify? Wordpress?). This can impact your site speed. 
  • Size/age of your blog. Do you have 200+ articles? While content can help improve SEO, depending on quality, keywords and relevancy it might be hindering you.  
  • Ecommerce capabilities. What Ecommerce platform are you using?
  • And yes, your chat widget 

 So, now that we’ve had that discussion and you can go back to your team more informed. Let’s discuss Chatbots and Live Chat.  

How important is chat to your sales and revenue?  

First, you and your team must make a business decision, how important is it for you to have chat? Keeping in mind that Live Chat can help increase your revenue by 6% and increase average order value (AOV) by 10%. A Shopify e-commerce study found that consumers who engaged with sales associates over video chat were 70% more likely to make a purchase. Additionally, 80% of businesses said that implementing live chat resulted in increased customer loyalty, sales and revenue. (Source) 

Chatbots vs. Live Chat  

Chatbots require more data and are therefore often a heavier lift for your website. Typically their size is 15MB+. The other downside to a bot is obviously unhelpful bot answers. 47.5% of US internet users feel the greatest challenge with chatbots is they provide too many unhelpful responses. (Source: Statista) 

Live Chat is usually less cumbersome to implement on your website.  Take Optimy.ai. It only requires 5 lines of code to run on your website. This is a simple website addition that is only 2.5MB and therefore doesn’t significantly slow down your site compared to our competitors, many of whom are 10MB or above. Even compared to our live chat competitors Optimy is unmatched.  

 Now that you can identify what is slowing down your site, you can figure out how to solve the issue. Want to learn more about Optimy? Book a demo today.  

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