This is for anyone that requested I show our team's workaround for helping page speed with the bloated Live Chat script.
First set the Hubspot chat setting to not immediately load live chat. This single setting alone prevents the "vistor.js" file from loading which appears to be the main contributing file to the slow down. Only allow the live chat to load immediately if you know the user to be in a chat session or if the live chat auto launch hash url is used. (#hs-chat-open)
//Prevent chat from loading immediately load only if chat is not in progress or #hs-chat-open is not in the url
if (sessionStorage.getItem("chatInProgress") !== "true" && window.location.hash !== "#hs-chat-open") {
window.hsConversationsSettings = { loadImmediately: false };
}
Now that the chat is blocked. We have to artifically create a chat button that will launch live chat only when clicked by the user. The rest of this code will also set a session storage for knowing if the user's conversation is open, which will allow live chat to load itself on page load. There is also observer mutation events to detect when the live chat window is opened, so you can hide the fake hubspot chat button.
if (window.HubSpotConversations) {
hubspotChatReady();
} else {
window.hsConversationsOnReady = [hubspotChatReady];
}
function hubspotChatReady() {
//Proceed to immediately load Live Chat while conversation is persisting
window.HubSpotConversations.addEventListener("conversationStarted", function () {
sessionStorage.setItem("chatInProgress", "true");
});
window.HubSpotConversations.addEventListener("conversationClosed", function () {
sessionStorage.removeItem("chatInProgress");
});
//Fake Hubspot Live chat button to launch real live chat only when user clicks
//Ignore if Live Chat is already loaded
if (window.HubSpotConversations.widget.status().loaded === false) {
var $liveChat = document.getElementById("activate-chat");
$liveChat.style.display = "block";
$liveChat.addEventListener("click", function (event) {
event.preventDefault();
$liveChat.classList.add("loading");
//Chat window is open when the iframe is loaded in the dom (Hubspot doesn't give a callback for the chat window opening)
var observer = new MutationObserver(function (mutationList, observer) {
mutationList.forEach(function (m) {
m.addedNodes.forEach(function (n) {
if (n.id === "hubspot-messages-iframe-container") {
n.querySelector('iframe').addEventListener('load', function () {
$liveChat.classList.remove("loading");
window.HubSpotConversations.widget.open();
observer.disconnect();
});
}
});
});
});
observer.observe(document.body, { childList: true, attributes: false, subtree: false });
window.HubSpotConversations.widget.load({ widgetOpen: true });
})
}
}
I hope this helps some people. This is not a perfect workaround. Some of the shortfalls would be if you use Hubspot's "hide launcher" setting. Where maybe you want to turn Live Chat on or off from the portal. This workaround bakes in a fake button that doesn't know if Hubspot chat should or shouldn't be showing. In our situation we leave Live Chat open 24/7 and just use away messages.
We are still waiting for Hubspot to take some concern with page speed. But until then we'll do what we can to work around it.
Btw for those who confuse how to create the button, i found another workaround by adding delay. So it will load the chat widget after "X" milliseconds.
Hi all! We recently updated the "Time on page in seconds" trigger. Delaying the chat widget load by at least 5 seconds should optimize for a faster initial page load.
Appologies for not making that clear. This code will not create the fake button for you. You'll need to add that yourself and use the click and observation events in the script to control the fake button. We used the 'activate-chat' element you see in the code. Which is a graphic that looks exactly like the hubspot button in the same place.
I would note the code I posted is a good start to a workaround, it is NOT a plug and play script. You'll need a developer who understands it to implement and ammend it to your needs.
The fact that you had to write all this custom script for a Hubspot chat feature is completely ridiculous and should not be necessary.
How can a thread that has this many comments from unhappy users get away with having "it's probably some other problem with your website, bro" as the only response from a Hubspot rep? This is insane.
Thank you for posting! Quick question - we are pushing pop-up messages upon user login and have logic built in hubspot based on user properties. These properties drive the popup content. Will this solution fail in that scenario? It looks like the chat widget is only enabled upon user-click.
Thank you for posting! Quick question - we are pushing pop-up messages upon user login and have logic built in hubspot based on user properties. These properties drive the popup content. Will this solution fail in that scenario? It looks like the chat widget is only enabled upon user-click.
If by "pop-up messages" you're referring to the chat bot responses then no this workaround wouldn't affect any logic you have in your chatflow. You are correct that this workaround requires user interaction to launch the chat widget. A user click is required to know if we should bother loading in chat resources. The exceptions to chat loading with a user click are, having a chat conversation in session OR if #hs-chat-open is present in the url. This hash tells Hubspot to auto launch the chat, so if it's used we don't want to restrict the chat from loading immediately.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
