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Every other channel belongs to someone else — Meta, Telegram, a phone network. This one is yours: a chat bubble on your own website, with conversations landing in the same inbox, routed by the same rules, answered by the same agents. Visitors install nothing and need no account. They click the bubble and type.

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Turn it on

1

Create the channel

Settings → Channels → Website chat. Type the domain the widget will run on — acme.com — and press Create.The domain is asked for first because a channel with no domain serves nobody: the widget refuses to load anywhere it hasn’t been allowed. That is the safe default, and also the most common reason a freshly-pasted snippet shows nothing.
2

Save the identity secret

It is shown once, on creation, and starts with wc_sec_. You only need it if your visitors sign in — see If your visitors are signed in — but there is no way to read it later, so store it now or rotate it when you need it.
3

Copy the snippet into your site

One line, just before the closing </body> tag, on every page you want the bubble on. The Install tab has yours with the key already in it:
4

Grant the channel to a role

Roles → the role → Channels. A channel nobody is granted delivers to nobody. This is the step people miss on every channel, and this one is no different.
5

Load your site and send yourself a message

The bubble appears bottom-right. Send a test message and watch it arrive in the inbox.
Not comfortable editing your site’s HTML? Most platforms have a place for this:
  • WordPress — Appearance → Theme File Editor → footer.php, or any “custom scripts” plugin.
  • Shopify — Online Store → Themes → Edit code → theme.liquid, before </body>.
  • Webflow — Project settings → Custom code → Footer code.
  • Wix / Squarespace — the site’s custom-code or code-injection panel.
Anything that asks for “footer code” or “code before the closing body tag” is the right box.

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Which domains it runs on

Website chat → Settings → Security. The widget boots only on the domains listed there. The website id in your snippet is public: it sits in a page anyone can view the source of. This list is what makes that safe. A key copied out of your site is useless on any domain you haven’t allowed.
Add your staging domain too if you test there, and remove * before you launch. A widget that boots anywhere can be embedded on somebody else’s page and used to send you messages that look like they came from your own site.

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Make it look like yours

Website chat → Settings → Appearance. Changes save straight to the widget — no code change, no deploy. Reload the page and they’re there, with a preview beside the form as you edit.
A pale brand colour with white text on it is unreadable. The preview warns you when the contrast falls below the accessibility threshold — if it does, darken the colour or set the text colour yourself. If it looks washed out to you, it is worse for anyone with low vision.
Under Messages you set the team name, greeting, offline message and composer placeholder, and choose the language — Arabic switches the whole widget to right-to-left. Developers can override the colours, position and launcher per page from the snippet itself — a docs site that wants the bubble on the left, a checkout page that wants it hidden. See the widget guide.

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What a visitor gets

  • Their history. A returning visitor sees their past conversations and can reopen one or start a new one.
  • Attachments. Images, PDFs and files up to 25 MB, if you leave them on.
  • Typing indicators and read receipts, in both directions.
  • Live replies, even with the panel closed — the bubble shows an unread count.
You can ask for a name, email or phone number before the chat starts — Settings → Behaviour → Before the chat starts. Keep it short. Every field you add is a reason to close the widget instead of typing, and you can ask for the email later, when they already want an answer from you.

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When nobody is available

Availability follows agent presence and your shifts, the same as everything else. See Presence and Shifts and rotas.
  • Someone is ready — the widget says so, and shows your typical reply time if you set one.
  • Nobody is — visitors see your offline message and can still write. The conversation waits in the inbox.
You can override this under Settings → Behaviour → Availability: always show as available (sensible when an AI agent answers first), or always show as away.
Don’t advertise a reply time you can’t hold on a Friday night. Leave the field empty and the widget promises nothing — an unanswered promise costs you more than no promise.

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Who gets the chat

Exactly like every other channel: sticky owner first, then your distribution settings. See How assignment works. Two things are specific to website chat:
  • A visitor is anonymous until they tell you who they are. Until then there is no customer record to be sticky to, so the chat is distributed fresh — and no lead is created. A lead appears the moment they give a name, email or phone number, through the pre-chat form, in the conversation, or because your site identified them. This is deliberate: a lead per anonymous visitor would fill your pipeline with rows nobody can follow up, and count each one against your plan’s active contacts.
  • An AI agent can take the first turn and hand over when it can’t answer — worth having on a channel where people expect an instant reply.

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If your visitors are signed in

If the widget sits behind a login — a dashboard, a customer portal — your site can tell us who the visitor is, and the conversation attaches to that customer instead of an anonymous one. Their history then follows them across devices.
Do this with identity verification. Without a signature, the browser is simply claiming an identity, and anyone who can open developer tools can claim someone else’s and read their conversations. Your server signs each user id with the channel’s identity secret; we check it before trusting the claim.Turn on Require a valid signature under Settings → Security once your site is signing, and have your developers follow Identity verification. It is a few lines of server-side code.
Sign out all visitors on the same page invalidates every stored session at once. Every visitor’s browser becomes a new, anonymous one; nothing is deleted, they simply can’t see their history any more. It exists for the day a secret leaks.

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Nothing appears on the site

In order:
  1. Is the domain in the allowlist, exactly as it appears in the address bar? acme.com covers www.acme.com, but shop.acme.com needs *.acme.com.
  2. Is the channel Connected, not paused?
  3. Did the snippet land on the page? View source and search for linkiasoft.
  4. Open the browser console. The widget writes one line starting [Linkia chat] when it refuses to start, and it says why.
  5. Ad blockers and privacy extensions block chat widgets. Test in a clean browser profile before assuming it’s broken.
Almost always the role grant: Roles → the role → Channels. A connected channel that no role includes delivers to nobody, and the visitor sees no error.
The snippet is on the page twice — often once in the theme footer and once in a tag manager. The widget only loads once per page no matter how many times you paste it, so a second bubble means a second, different snippet.
Availability follows presence and shifts, not whether someone is logged in. An agent on Busy or outside a shift doesn’t count as available. See Presence, or set availability to Always show as available if an AI agent answers first.
The visitor’s session lives in their own browser. Clearing site data, a private window, or a different device all start fresh — that is expected. To carry history across devices, identify signed-in visitors as described above.It also happens after Sign out all visitors, or after rotating the website id.
Working as intended while the visitor is anonymous — see Who gets the chat. Turn on the pre-chat form, or ask for an email in the conversation, and the lead is created then.