Growing a website is a daunting task. In fact, even creating a website is hard enough. But once you get it off the ground, you’re always faced with getting people to visit and more: keep coming back. A good way to retain users is to do more for them. Sure, your content is already great, but they are mostly passive buyers. What if you give them a way to interact with each other through your website?
If you have an active community, you may want to accommodate requests to interact with a chat room on your website and discuss your content. And this tutorial is all about that. But before we get down to the basics of setting up a WordPress chat room, we would like to discuss in more detail the reasons why you might find it useful. If you are sure that you can use a chat room, feel free to go to the section you need.
Well, first of all, it’s a interactive feature. A chat room turns your users from buyers of your content into contributors where relevant topics are discussed. It’s also a good way to find out what your visitors are interested in and provide them with more content. The content that sparks the most interesting discussions.
While a chat room is primarily for your visitors, it isn’t just for that. You can (and should!) supply with a moderator to facilitate and manage their communications, as well as to be a point of contact between your visitors and the content creators and administrators of your website. A shrewd moderator can spot and address potential issues even before they become serious, which can lead to a better user experience – an important factor in converting casual visitors into regular visitors.
A chat room also has its downsides. While useful as a data collection tool, chat rooms will only give you an idea of what your most communicative, most extroverted visitors are thinking. It’s easy to look no further than the low hanging fruit. In addition to these, If left unchecked, a chat room can turn into a toxic dump of vile abuse. If you don’t have staff to monitor your chat rooms in real time but still want to let your visitors interact, why not consider a forum plugin instead? If connecting with your users is more important to you than their own interactions, we recommend looking into live chat software.
still a direct approach and interactions between users make chat rooms useful tool for community building. If you think your visitors will like a place where they can interact with each other and possibly reach you more directly, then a chat room might be what you need.
WordPress does not have a chat room functionality by default. However, as is often the case, this functionality can be provided by a plugin. The plugin we will use is smart chat. After installing and activating the plugin, you will need to configure it. You can access the configuration settings from your WordPress dashboard. Set route to Settings/Smart Chat Settings.
Even the free version of this plugin has a number of settings for your WordPress chat room. We will consider the most important ones.
In general screen under General SettingsYou have the option Collect User Statistics if it is useful for your business. Of course, it goes without saying that you must obtain the prior and informed consent of your users to do this. The legal details of dealing with user data vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and GDPR is standard in Europe, but you can easily create a disclaimer in the form of a preference form or a popup or even on the same page. as your chat room.
Scroll down below Chat Access SettingsYou will find the option Disable Anonymous Users (i.e. only allow logged in users to use your chat room), as well as options to make the chat read-only for anonymous users or users in certain types of roles.
Finally, at the bottom of the screen, Enable Open Controlto make the chat room available only on the days and times specified.
In Message Sending screenYou can set the maximum message length and enable or disable links, Twitter hashtags and emoticons.
This screen also deals with user notification options (sounds and banner notifications), attachment settings (images and other files) and YouTube video settings that you can play in the chat window.
This moderation it takes care of the screen moderation settings: you can leave the chat room completely unsupervised, or you can also allow various users (by role) to delete messages and kick or ban users.
By swiping down on the same screen, you will find the options. Spam Reporting. You can allow all or only some users to report spam on your chat channels and customize the notification email.
Further down the selection menu, you will find the wide range of products. Appearance Options. Here you can choose a theme and define the look and feel of your chat window, message windows and even usernames, assigning different colors to different types of users (admins, subscribers, editors…). This is also where you configure font sizes and colors, as well as additional CSS date formats if needed.
Over channels screen, you can set limits on user numbers in channels or private chat rooms.
If you want to make sure your chat room is family friendly, you can disallow certain words on the site. filters screen. You can also clearly indicate that the user is using a filtered word by setting the text to replace for each of these cases. Be careful when configuring it though: many users will be offended if innocent words or phrases are accidentally banned (this is known as: Scunthorpe problem).
This prohibits screen allows you to ban users yourself for as long as you want and even set up an automatic ban system based on disallowed words or overflows (lots of messages in a short time).
Banned IPs will not be allowed to send messages on any channel for a certain period of time. Over kicks however, you can discard IPs: these users will not be allowed to post any messages or view chats until you remove them.
Finally, on localization screen Enable Custom Localization. When this option is checked, WordPress allows you to customize all the text that appears to users of your chat room. You can use it to translate all the default text into a language preferred by your users, but also to better match your website’s writing style.
This Further screen, allows you to configure user authentication, chat engine, and other topics that may be of interest to administrators and web designers. They are not for the general user. Configuration options that we haven’t covered in this tutorial are mainly reserved for Pro users.
Whatever changes you make from the default, Save Changes under each section.
So you installed Wise Chat and configured your chat room. How do you make it accessible to your users?
It’s easy with Wise Chat. Once you have configured your chat room, you can embed it on your website using it. [wise-chat] sshort code. As an aside, we will say that the developers have made this plugin easy and fast to use, even if you don’t want to go through all the configuration options by adding parameters to this shortcode. This allowed parameters A list with detailed instructions can be found on the developer’s website, but we recommend using it only if you don’t want to stray too far from the default values.
When it comes to chat rooms, we recommend separating them from the rest of your website with a handy reminder for clear links and chat rules and clearly show your users that they’re entering a shared space.
We will start with creating a page. You can do this simply by going to: Pages/Add New In your WordPress dashboard.
Here you can do whatever you want to make your chat room stand out. We’ll add a title and some ground rules, but if you think you need it, this is also a good place for some form of disclaimer.
Next, we will select the plus sign to add. shortcode block. Elementor users can use the shortcode element, while Classic Editor users can place the shortcode wherever they want when using the HTML view of their page editor.
we will paste it later [wise-chat] shortcode and click Publish to open our chat room.
And just like that, your chat room is open for business. Hello, website visitors! Feel free to join the conversation.
As a result
And this is how you set up a WordPress chat room. As we said, it’s easy enough and even the free plugin we chose has an extensive set of options designed to make your visitors’ interactions dynamic and secure. If you think your website could benefit from this, why not let your users freely and dynamically exchange ideas? They will appreciate it.
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