I am currently helping our web messaging team with a deployment on our high-traffic retail site. We are worried about the impact on our website performance when the messaging widget loads for every visitor. Are there any best practices for ‘Lazy Loading’ the messaging snippet or using the ‘Headless’ SDK to ensure that the chat widget does not slow down our page load times during our peak sales events?
Hello! I am a DevOps engineer and I use Terraform to manage our web messaging configurations. You should definitely use the ‘Lazy Loading’ pattern. You only load the Genesys Cloud script after the user interacts with a ‘Chat’ button. This prevents the browser from downloading several hundred kilobytes of JavaScript before the user even decides to talk to us. It is a simple change to your front end code that makes a huge difference in your Core Web Vitals.
I have seen many people break their SSO integration by lazy loading the script incorrectly. If you are using ‘Authenticated Web Messaging’, you must ensure that your authentication token is ready before you initialize the messaging client. If you lazy load the script too late, the user might see a login prompt instead of being automatically signed in.
I have been testing the Headless SDK for our custom React implementation. If you want the ultimate performance, the Headless SDK is the way to go. You have total control over the UI and the loading sequence. However, be prepared to write a lot of custom code to handle the message history and the file uploads. It is not a ‘plug-and-play’ solution like the standard widget, but for a high-traffic retail site, the performance gains are worth the effort.