Will a chat widget slow my website down?
It should not, and you can check. Ours loads about 2.5 KB compressed and creates nothing else until somebody actually clicks it, so it does not touch your page-speed scores.
Chat widgets have a bad reputation here, and it is earned. Plenty of them load a full application framework on every page view whether anybody opens the chat or not, which shows up in Core Web Vitals and, eventually, in rankings.
The fix is unglamorous: keep the thing on your page tiny and put everything else behind a click. What loads with your page is a small script that draws a button. The conversation itself lives in a frame that is not created until somebody opens it, so a visitor who ignores the bubble has downloaded a couple of kilobytes and nothing more.
The same frame is what keeps the conversation private. Because it is served from our origin rather than injected into your page, nothing else running on your site — an analytics tag, a session recorder, another vendor’s script — can read what a visitor types into it.
You do not have to take our word for any of it. Run your site through PageSpeed Insights before and after. If a vendor will not let you do that before you commit, that is the answer.