topic Re: Live Chat App slows page down in Lead Capture Tools

Live Chat App slows page down

merlinvicki — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 11:14:43 GMT

Hi,

I have the Hubspot Chat installed here:

https://www.3mediaweb.com/great-b2b-software-company-websites/

There is a file:

https://static.hsappstatic.net/conversations-visitor-ui/static-1.383/bundles/visitor.js

which is almost a 1.39 mb file. Is there no way to compress the scripts so it loads faster?

Re: Live Chat App slows page down

jennysowyrda — Tue, 06 Feb 2018 19:52:29 GMT

Hey @merlinvicki,

There is no way to shrink the size of the file. If you are noticing your site is running slow, I would recommend looking at other elements of your site.

Thank you,
Jenny

Re: Live Chat App slows page down

skemble — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 22:24:55 GMT

Hi Jenny,

We've put a lot of work in to improving our mobile pagespeed score and load times. Implementing chat on our site dropped our mobile pagespeed score by an avg of 25 points and our desktop pagespeed score by an avg of 11 pts. Surely you must have a solution other than instructing us to look at other elements of our site. Our site is otherwise fast, the culprit for the reduction in speed is strictly the chatbot/visitor.js.

As you can see in the screenshot linked here it takes 10x longer to load than the next longest script. This isn't really acceptable in what some are calling 'The year of pagespeed'.

@thisisdatis

Re: Live Chat App slows page down

jennysowyrda — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 20:25:26 GMT

Hi @skemble,

I wanted to share this resource which is a great resource for HubSpot and page speed.

Thank you,

Jenny

Re: Live Chat App slows page down

thisisdatis — Fri, 12 Apr 2019 23:01:39 GMT

Hi @jennysowyrda - your script is the problem. It loads 10x slower than other scripts. What are you doing to speed things up? As a marketing automation company catering to marketers, you should know the importance of page speed and how it affects mobile rankings. Especially with this being the "year of page speed" according to Google.

Re: Live Chat App slows page down

davidmmb — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 06:29:58 GMT

Was there any update on this?

We are experiencing the same issue?

When we include the tracking code on our website - it will add 20+ requests and slows down the page load by around 2-6 seconds.

Re: Live Chat App slows page down

bsplosion — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 18:38:30 GMT

Hi Jenny and the HubSpot crew - it's now October 2019, and the visitor.js script you bundle is still massive and a tremendous resource hog. It consumes more resources than the entire rest of our web app combined! This should really be broken down into consituent components and served separately depending on the requisite functionality - I highly doubt you need to serve such a large file for simple chat and tracking functionality.

For a benchmark of a couple of your competitors, the Heap Analytics dependency has 1/13th of your footprint, and in that they manage to still identify visitors and track page events at a finer grain than your system. Chatlio's dependency is about 1/40th.

tl;dr: Tracking and chat with forms takes at most 1/10th of what your library needs and your users (who rely on you for marketing and sales) need your help to get ranked. It's time to optimize.

Edit: And Jenny, regarding your answer, it's not sufficient. You're referencing an engineering challenge as impossible, and a cursory review of the dependency reveals that's not true. An easy example is that your team has chosen to define literal month names 3 (!!!) times in the dependency. If that's happening in a minified file, I can only imagine what the code itself looks like.

Re: Live Chat App slows page down

edsvcs — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 10:01:59 GMT

We are also very interested in this. Additionally, it appears the app is including js.usemessages.com which is from MarkMonitor. We need to understand what this is tracking and who has access to the data. Is this just facilitating the tracking we see in our contact records or is this data available to any third parties?

Re: Live Chat App slows page down

rawphael — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 17:32:25 GMT

Any official updates on this issue? We noticed tremendous speed drops after integrating Hubspot into our site. Very disappointing.

Re: Live Chat App slows page down

skemble — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 17:50:37 GMT

I'm also interested in hearing if there has been an update to correct this. We have discontinued the chat functionality entirely because of the associated speed issues.

Re: Live Chat App slows page down

thisisdatis — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 18:40:47 GMT

Same here - as marketing automation platform, your tools shouldn't be hindering a businesses' SEO.

Re: Live Chat App slows page down

davidmmb — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 00:52:56 GMT

Around 6 months ago - I provided the support team with detailed technical analysis. Unfortunately, they didn't understand the issue and suggested my site was slow.

In response, I created two versions of my site, one with chat and one without (on the same server). This showed that the page load time was 4-12 seconds slower with chat (according to google page speed insights, GT Metrix and Pingdom).

Ultimately, I had my contract cancelled and no longer use HubSpot.

Re: Live Chat App slows page down

tschemmel — Fri, 07 Feb 2020 15:26:01 GMT

Performance and speed is very important for our ecommerce site. We depend on hubspot for marketing as well as customer service (live chat). We also noticed Hubspot's live chat has an abnormally high drain on performance. We were met with the same "check your site" solution from Hubspot. Very disappointing.

Re: Live Chat App slows page down

mgwaters — Sun, 29 Mar 2020 18:07:16 GMT

I too show that as a % of page load it takes up a considerable amount:

static.hsappstatic.net 34.19% 390.0KB

Re: Live Chat App slows page down

GregWright — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 17:25:22 GMT

This needs sorting Hubspot, when I activate live chat on my site my page speed halves!!

Re: Live Chat App slows page down

chrisfink — Sat, 04 Apr 2020 18:00:10 GMT

We are experiencing the same issues here. We just invested thousands of dollars into our site thinking that the theme code (we run on Shopify) was the culprit. Come to find out, and I should have dug deeper prior to this, it's the HubSpot chat widget/app that is causing our slowdown. Our Google rank has dropped significantly because of this.

What is being done to solve this? We spend thousands of dollars every year on HubSpot and for this issue to go unsolved, or at least without a suitable response, is unacceptable.

Re: Live Chat App slows page down

tschemmel — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 23:14:03 GMT

I'm still amazed Hubspot development team doesn't see priority in this issue. Our ecommerce site is nothing without excellent SEO. My dev team works all the time to carve away milliseconds of load time off our site just to keep our page speed score up. All of the Hubspot tracking code weighs heavy on this but the live chat is the worst part of it.

Luckily we found an acceptable workaround for us right now to not load live chat until a user engages with it. This has helped our score without sacrificing live chat for our customers.

We use this config to prevent live chat from loading immediately.

window.hsConversationsSettings = { loadImmediately: false };

And then we artificially create the Hubspot live chat button on our site with an action to launch live chat.

window.HubSpotConversations.widget.open();

There is of course more necessary scripting to allow live chat to load immediately if a chat session is in progress. Feel free to message me if interested in seeing our full script workaround.

Re: Live Chat App slows page down

rvzello — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 11:39:21 GMT

Experiencing same issue here - chat load JS is the biggest resource hog on our site... Would love to see Hubspot find a solution.

Re: Live Chat App slows page down

udayanw — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 14:09:02 GMT

Same issue. Team HubSpot, please look at your competitors like Intercom, Freshchat etc. They load twice as fast. Honestly optimizing this shouldn't take you this long. It's not like the chatbot is loading slightly slow so its not a burning issue.

The chatbot is loading slower than the ENTIRE website. This is a huge red flag wow.

Re: Live Chat App slows page down

bsplosion — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 23:11:12 GMT

@tschemmel, I'd love to see how your team worked around this issue! If it's not sensitive, posting it here would likely be a big help to everyone else who otherwise can't get HubSpot to optimize their bundle.