Olark Live Chat vs Smush – Image Optimization, Compression, Lazy Load, WebP & CDN

Why Olark Live Chat for Businesses? 79% of businesses say live chat increased their customer loyalty, sales, and revenue. Grow your business quickly and effectively with Olark live chat for WordPress, the most user-friendly chat integration around! You don’t have to take our word for it though. Here’s how one of our customers on WordPress described his experience: “We chose Olark due to how easy it was to install and get my less than tech-savvy team effective at using it. We have won some very large opportunities through live chat. It’s clear that there is a segment of customers we want to do business with that prefer live chat….” Christopher Dunkin, General Manager of Portable Air (See the story) Olark’s WordPress chat plugin takes just seconds to add to your website, so you can start talking to customers right away. We’ve also built Olark to be very fast to learn. You got this, seriously! Not only that, but everything you do in Olark integrates directly into many other popular tools that you already use, from CRM and email to e-commerce and analytics. Try out Olark for mobile too, now in Beta! Our WordPress chat tool also lets you customize your chatbox appearance, create rules and shortcuts for efficient chatting, save and search your chat transcripts, and much more. Whether you’re looking to increase sales generate more leads serve current customers (or all of the above!) it’s easy to get results with Olark’s chat widget. To try it out, you can get started with a free 14-day live chat trial here. Then follow the quick steps in our integration guide and you’re good to go! Our customers love the fast install and Olark’s simple but powerful features: “We’ve sold quite a lot through Olark. I like its simplicity. It lets us have direct contact, with no filters in between.” – Robert Grubstad, owner of Audio Concept “In our research for chat partner plug-ins, Olark seemed to be the most user-friendly and, of course, the plug-and-play with WordPress made a lot of sense for us.” – Dana Stafford, president of Regional Access Read more experiences from our WordPress customers and WooCommerce-specific customers. Features Whatever your business goal, Olark has the simple, functional live chat features to help you get there. Start a conversation with anyone browsing your website, and use core features to listen, learn, and improve. Engage customers in real time: Proactively start chats with customers Get customizable agent alerts when visitors take specific actions Be in the right place at the right time to assist Speed up your workflow: Configure automation rules with ease Greet customers automatically Route chats to the right department Send custom messages automatically based on visitor behavior Show and hide your chatbox on just the right pages Learn from live chat analytics: Get real-time reports on chat volume, customer satisfaction & agent activity Receive detailed summary reports in your inbox Make data-driven decisions on staffing and prioritization Get context: Ask your customers for valuable information pre-chat Make any or all questions optional Build your own forms with a flexible drag-and-drop editor Discover powerful customer insights: Save full chat transcripts in your archive Search and filter transcripts by keywords, tags, date, and more Add followup tasks to act on your insights Keep your team aligned: Distribute and route chats easily Monitor team performance Access a shared database of your unique Olark Shortcuts to greetings, FAQs, and more Go further with PowerUps [paid premium features]: Add specialized features as you need them Guide your visitor better by viewing their screen with co-browsing Get real-time translation for global chats Remove branding from your chatbox Score leads, prioritize chats, and collect visitor data from public social profiles Make your Business Human with Olark Live Chat If your business needs a live chat tool that is easy to use yet fully-featured, then Olark is right for you. It only takes a few simple steps to add our intuitive live chat software to your website. Olark makes it effortless to talk to more customers on your website in a human way, which has been shown to increase sales, increase average purchase size, and improve customer satisfaction. What is the Olark WordPress Plugin? Olark is a simple, powerful WordPress chat widget. Just install the Olark live chat plugin on your WordPress instance, then refresh your WordPress website to see your brand new chatbox! To back it all up, we offer rapid support via (you guessed it) Olark live chat, Twitter, email, and our robust Help Center. Requirements The Olark WordPress plugin is compatible with the latest version of self-hosted WordPress.org sites. It will not work with a WordPress.com blog. To install, first get started with a free 14-day trial of Olark! Then just follow the quick steps in our integration guide to add the plugin. E-Commerce Integration for WordPress: WooCommerce Olark live chat also has a WooCommerce plugin for e-commerce businesses! Read our profile on 6 businesses successfully using this integration to go further with sales and support. You can see inside your visitors’ WooCommerce shopping carts with our special Olark Cart Saver feature. Tempt them with a discount or just offer them some personalized assistance! Learn more about the Olark WooCommerce integration and see our easy setup guide. For Developers Fun fact: We were one of the very first live chat plugins for WordPress! We even powered the chat support for WordPress.com for many years. We’ve been active on GitHub since 2011, and strongly believe in supporting the open source movement. Our JavaScript API gives you flexibility and control over the Olark chatbox. Together with Webhooks and Zapier, you can add your own custom integrations (in addition to many pre-built ones)! We also set high standards for the customer support we provide. As customers, we want quick, friendly, helpful service. As Olarkers, we want you to feel a human connection whenever you contact us. Read our guarantee to you here. You can breathe easy on accessibility, security, and privacy. Accessibility is a priority for us, and Olark live chat fully supports WCAG 2.1 AA. We invite submissions from professional security researchers: learn about our security bug bounty program. Your data is secure and encrypted. And our GDPR and Privacy features were built to simplify compliance. Documentation and Support Need more help? Try these guides: WordPress for Olark Live Chat Integration Olark WordPress Plugin Install Olark Product Tour Olark Help Center Other Integrations Want your live chat software to play nicely with your CRM, email, analytics, helpdesk, or other functionality? We designed Olark to integrate with your favorite software. Besides WordPress and WooCommerce, Olark integrates with: Hubspot Salesforce Slack Zendesk Front Help Scout SugarCRM Nutshell Mailchimp Pardot JIRA Google Analytics BigCommerce ActiveCampaign Magento Groove Greenrope Squarespace Constant Contact Webhooks Zapier … and more! Plus, you can use one of our custom integration strategies. Localization Olark live chat supports the following languages: Chinese, Simplified (China) Dutch (Netherlands) English (United States) French (France) German (Germany) Italian (Italy) Portuguese (Brazil) Russian (Russia) Spanish (Spain) Swedish (Sweden) Turkish (Turkey) You can also fully customize all language strings. Learn more about changing your chatbox language by page or sitewide here. We also offer a PowerUp add-on feature to translate your live chats in real time. Partner Program Join our trusted partner community of industry experts and spread the word about your business to Olark customers (and earn a little extra income too). We welcome agency, referral, and technology partners! See more details and apply here. Olark Live Chat Software Feature Set Chat Tools File sharing: Send and receive JPG, JPEG, PNG, GIF, PDF and TXT files via the chatbox. Chat transfers: Reassign chats to deliver consistent service and efficient solutions. Visitor details: View visitor name, location, and more while you chat. Chat notifications: Receive desktop notifications for new chat messages. Visitor page tracking: Track the URL of visitors as they move through your site. Chat Analytics Chat volume: Monitor chat volume to identify your busiest times and staff accordingly. Chat tagging: Add custom tags to your chats for transcript sorting and analysis. Visitor history: Review prior interactions with visitors from within the chat console. Emailed reports: Receive daily, weekly, or monthly summaries of data in your inbox. Google Analytics: Automatically add chat events to your Google Analytics dashboard. Transcript archives: Review, search, and filter complete transcripts of all you chats. Team Management Groups: Create agent groups to route chats by department, specialty, and more. Conversation limit: Improve service by limiting the number of chats per agent. Activity monitoring: View chat volume, agent activity, and other metrics in real-time. Agent performance reports: View agent availability, response times, and ratings. Customer satisfaction survey: Ask visitors to rate their service when a chat ends. Pre-chat survey: Ask questions or request contact details before starting a chat. Automation Chat routing: Automatically assign chats based on visitor details. Proactive chat: Initiate a chat when a visitor meets your specified criteria. Canned responses: Speed up chat with keyboard shortcuts for frequently-used messages. Visitor targeting: Automate messages and chatbox behavior based on visitor details. Automatic greeter: Greet visitors with an automated chat message. Offline contact form: Offer a custom contact form when chat is offline. Customization API: Control the chatbox appearance and behavior through Olark’s JavaScript API. Custom logo: Attach your company logo to your chatbox, or choose another custom image. Chat box theme: Customize your chatbox colors, shape, and more to match your brand. Unlimited domains: Add your chatbox to multiple websites, or to subdomains. Language selection: Set your chatbox and chat console to your preferred language. Right to left support: Customize your chatbox to support right-to-left languages. Security GDPR consent: Add pre-chat visitor consent options to your chatbox. Data redaction: Automatically redact a visitor data from transcripts. Data encryption: All Olark data is stored with AES symmetric encryption. Troll block: IP ban: Hide the chatbox from specified IP addresses and block trolls. PowerUps (Paid premium features, not included in all plans) Cobrowsing: View, annotate, and control your visitor’s screen. Non-branded chat box: Remove ‘Powered by Olark’ branding from you chatbox. Live chat translation: Automatically translate messages in 100+ languages. Visitor insights: Social: Collect visitor data from public websites & social profiles. Visitor insights: Social & Professional: Collect visitor data from business websites & social profiles. See the Full Features Chart. Success Stories “We have a fairly high close percentage. Of those who contact us via Olark, our close rate is more than 40%!” – AJ Levinson, CEO of BottleLess.com “Since we started using Olark, there’s definitely a more manageable flow of inquiries. We have more time available to spend on the phone with complex/larger inquiries and a reduction in people phoning to ask something simple like the delivery charge or stock levels. We can put more time into closing an order for, say, £2500, rather than stuck on the phone with a few people making £50 orders.” Davis James, Sales and Marketing Assistant for VPS Underfloor Heating See more success stories here: https://www.olark.com/case-studies About Us At Olark, we believe the world is a better place when everyone helps each other. In 2009, with initial funding by Y Combinator, we built a live chat platform that enables businesses to connect with their customers. Our team has grown from four friends in Palo Alto to a fully remote team that spans multiple time zones. We value diversity of thought and backgrounds. We have strong core values like empathy and radical candor that tie us together and help us grow our culture and product. We’re on a mission to humanize business. We make easy-to-use software that helps your team work together to connect with customers. Today Olark is used by more than 40,000 businesses worldwide. We also work to give you the best, most human customer service around. Read our Olark Service Standards here! Contributors The following people have contributed to this plugin: Olark

Compress images, optimize images, and enable image lazy load automatically with the powerful Smush image optimizer to keep your WordPress site fast, without losing quality. Smush makes it easy to optimize images, compress images, and deliver images faster across your entire WordPress site. This all-in-one image optimizer automatically reduces image file sizes, enables image lazy load, and serves modern formats like WebP and AVIF, all without breaking image quality or adding extra work. Whether you’re running a blog, store, or portfolio, Smush helps you optimize images at scale and keep your site fast with a trusted WordPress image optimizer. Trusted by 1+ Million Sites | 4.8/5 Star Rating Get everything you need to optimize images and speed up your site. Smush works out of the box with no complicated setup – just install and let it handle the rest. Compress images without losing quality Reduce image file size automatically while keeping your images sharp and clear. Smush is an easy-to-use image optimizer which let’s you compress images using both lossless and lossy compression, giving you the best balance of quality and performance without extra work. You can also compress images outside the media library using Directory Smush, making it easy to optimize images stored in theme folders, plugins, or other directories on your server. Lazy load images for faster pages Enable image lazy load across your site so images load only when needed. This image optimizer improves initial page speed and creates a smoother experience for visitors without extra configuration. Serve WebP and AVIF images automatically (PRO) Convert images to WebP and AVIF and serve them automatically to supported browsers. Smush helps you optimize images using next-gen formats to reduce file size and improve load times across your WordPress site. Deliver images faster with an Image CDN (PRO) Serve images through a global image CDN to reduce latency and improve load times for visitors around the world. 119 global CDN servers Up to 500 GB of bandwidth Faster image delivery based on visitor location Improved performance for image-heavy and high-traffic sites Automatically resize and fix image dimensions (PRO) Eliminate common PageSpeed warnings and improve layout stability with automatic image sizing. Smush dynamically resizes images to perfectly fit their containers, regardless of original size, helping fix the “Properly size images” warning in Google PageSpeed Insights. It also automatically adds missing width and height attributes to your images, improving rendering speed and reducing layout shifts. This helps you meet the “Ensure images have explicit width and height” recommendation without any manual work. Optimize your entire site, automatically Smush works across your whole site as a powerful image optimizer to optimize images as you upload them and maintain performance over time without manual work. Optimize images automatically on upload Compress images in bulk or individually Works with your existing media library No need to re-upload images Enable image lazy load across your site Convert images to WebP and AVIF Deliver images with an integrated image CDN Automatically resize and serve correctly sized images Optimize images outside the media library with Directory Smush Built for performance Smush improves page speed and overall performance by reducing image weight and improving how images are delivered. Reduce page load times Improve user experience Better performance for image-heavy pages Supports image lazy load and preload images (PRO) for faster perceived performance Works with your existing setup Smush is built to work with your current WordPress setup, including popular themes, page builders, and plugins. Compatible with Gutenberg, Elementor, WPBakery, and more Works with WooCommerce stores No need to change your workflow Easy to enable and configure Designed to be simple You don’t need to be a performance expert to optimize images with Smush image optimizer. Works out of the box Simple settings when you need them No technical knowledge required Safe to use on any site Why choose Smush? There are plenty of image optimization plugins, but Smush focuses on making it easy to optimize images, compress images, and improve performance without complexity. As a leading WordPress image optimizer, Smush gives you powerful optimization tools without the technical hassle. Trusted by over 1 million WordPress users Built specifically for WordPress Regular updates and improvements Backed by the WPMU DEV team Get started in minutes Install Smush, activate it, and start to compress images, optimize images, and enable image lazy load right away. This easy-to-use image optimizer helps most sites see improvements immediately without changing how they upload or manage images. About Us WPMU DEV is a premium supplier of quality WordPress plugins, services and support. Learn more here: https://wpmudev.com/ Don’t forget to stay up to date on everything WordPress from the Internet’s number one resource: WPMU DEV Blog Hey, one more thing… we hope you enjoy our free offerings as much as we’ve loved making them for you! Contact and Credits Originally written by Alex Dunae at Dialect (dialect.ca, e-mail ‘alex’ at ‘dialect dot ca’), 2008-11.