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We’ve used a bunch of different customer service “heads up” plugins, such as Intercom and Drift, but have been on the lookout for a more lightweight alternative. We’ve never been impressed with how these plugins add loads of extra requests, slow your site down, and require staff to learn yet another system.

So, as soon as we heard Facebook’s Customer Chat plugin was in open beta, we jumped at the chance to try it out, and also analyse its performance.

Here’s how Facebook Customer Chat impacts your website performance.

Website Performance Without Facebook Customer Chat

Our website is hosted on our own high performance servers and we monitor its performance routinely. This is because it doesn’t take long for a website scoring 100 on Google PageSpeed Insights to degrade unless it is watched like a hawk.

We quickly checked our home page’s performance before installing the FB Customer Chat code.

Everything was right on the money, with a blazingly fast sub-2 second load time and 29 requests.

Website Performance With Facebook Chat

Installing Facebook Customer Chat on WordPress takes less than 10 minutes (most of that time is just setting up the Facebook app) using this this awesome plugin. The steps are simple and it works like a dream.

Once installed, we checked our website’s performance again… 

WTF? 4.1 seconds to load and 69 requests!

Facebook Chat added 40 additional requests and increase our page load time by a massive 2.5 seconds! Not acceptable.

Website Performance With Facebook Chat

While you can argue these metrics are not the be-all and end-all of website performance, it is not acceptable to us. We are web performance specialists and one of our goals is to make your website fast, so we can’t have a slow website.

While we’ve decided not to use Facebook Customer Chat, we’ll continue to monitor its development. 

That being said, if you think it’ll help your conversion rates, give it a whirl!