LiveChat causing PageSpeed woes

LiveChat Talks Updates & Feedback
#1

I spend a lot of time tweaking my UK-based company website to make it faster and faster.

Unfortunately, a reoccurring problem that I cannot change myself is that LiveChat assets are:

  • Slow to load
  • Slow to be interactive (on average adding 6s to my load times)
  • LiveChat relies on resources across many domains increasing DNS queries
  • Forces loading of Google Fonts that I do not want to use, and when doing so, doesn’t apply the “font-display: swap;” CSS feature

I’ve verified that the poor performance is not unique to me, but also other websites that I know who are based in the UK that use LiveChat too.

Can we do something about this?

Thanks,

1 Like
#2

Hi @mohammed.ahmed,

Google has published the update regarding Google Fonts, that lets you control web font loading using font-display. Thanks to it, last week we were able to make changes that allow our chat window to download fonts in the font-display: swap; configuration, so it should work properly.

When it comes to slow loading, our script does not affect the overall performance of your website, please check out the following article:

Also, please see a document that breaks down the loading of our script on a sample page: http://livechat.cool/jp/materials_for_customers/Script_load_analysis.pdf

#3

This is total bull. The second we add your chat box, our site goes from a 90 to a 65 score. It is killing our SEO. We need a real solution, with proper code, or we need to move to another service.

4 Likes
#4

Hi @stadulis66! Could you please tell me if your website is implemented on Wordpress/any other service?

#5

Hi there, same issue. @Agnieszka we are using Wordpress and did the LC implementation via hard code. Would the use of the wp-plugin of LC making it faster?

#6

I have the same issues here. As soon as I accept chats and run Lighthouse my CLS score goes up, while it is 0 when I disable chats.

If you throttle network speed to 50 kb/s by creating a custom profile and then reload you see a blue flash for the entire page.

See: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62751471/how-to-find-cumulative-layout-shift-problems-if-page-speed-insights-says-one-thi on how to do this.

My best guess is that this is caused by “max-height: calc(100% - 0)” for #chat-widget-container
First of all, it doesn’t make sense to allocate the entire height with the chat widget minimized. On mobile it’s only 84x84 pixels. They could change its height as soon as a window is opened. If it is initiated by the user it won’t count towards the CLS score.
Secondly, it looks like a tweak. Why would you use calc(100% - 0) if you could just take 100%. Don’t know what they are trying to accomplish.

I made a comment about this earlier, but Livechat didn’t take it very seriously. They blame Google’s test and repeat that it won’t affect loading times. I can agree on that, but Core Web Vitals will become a ranking factor and we see ourselves dropping in the SERP’s already.