The Zinn® Chat plugin

Zinn® Chat puts a live chat window on your website. Your visitors type, you answer from your Zinn® dashboard, and anything nobody picks up is emailed to you with the whole conversation.

If we host your site the plugin is already installed. It is doing nothing until you switch it on — no script on your pages, no cookie, nothing stored, no requests. That is deliberate: a chat window that started talking to your visitors before you asked for it would be your problem, not ours, and we are not going to put you in that position.

Switching it on

1. In your Zinn® dashboard, open Live chat. Each of your sites has a chat; copy its key

(it starts with zc_).

2. On the WordPress site, go to Settings → Zinn® Chat, paste the key, tick **Show the

chat**, and save.

3. Add your web address in the dashboard under Web addresses this chat runs on — the

widget only answers pages you have listed, which is what stops anybody else putting your chat on their site.

If you host somewhere else, or the site is not WordPress at all, the dashboard gives you a one-line <script> snippet that does the same job on any site.

Where the settings live, and why they are not here

The greeting, the colour, your team's name, your opening hours, your saved replies and where missed conversations are emailed are all set once in the dashboard and apply to every site you run. If you have forty sites, that is one place to change your opening hours rather than forty. The WordPress screen holds only the two things that are specific to this site: which chat it is, and whether it is on.

What your visitors download

Under 7 KB, compressed — and nothing at all until somebody actually opens the chat. It loads after your page has finished drawing, so it cannot slow your content down, and it sits outside your layout, so it cannot push anything around. This is the part we care most about: most chat widgets cost your visitors several hundred kilobytes on every page whether or not anyone ever clicks them.

Hiding it on some pages

Add this to your theme to keep the chat off your checkout, or away from staff:

add_filter( 'zinn_chat_should_render', function ( $render ) {
    return function_exists( 'is_checkout' ) && is_checkout() ? false : $render;
} );

Privacy

The widget stores one thing in your visitor's browser — which conversation is theirs, so a page refresh does not lose what they typed. It sets no cookies, does not follow anybody between sites, and does not record IP addresses. The country you see beside a conversation is worked out from the connection at our edge and the address itself is never kept.

When nobody answers

After five minutes with no reply, we email the conversation to the address you set, with everything said so far. Set it under Live chat → Settings; leave it blank and we will not send anything, which is a choice rather than an oversight but is worth making on purpose.