freshdesk-messaging-facade

Freshdesk Messaging (formerly Freshchat) Facade

The Freshdesk Messaging widget loads more than 1.1 MB (gzipped) of JavaScript on page-load.

This facade (less than 1 KB gzipped) prevents Freshdesk's JavaScript from loading until the chat widget is hovered over saving your users a lot of bandwidth and substantially improving page-load times.

Comparison

	Freshdesk Messaging JS	Freshdesk Messaging Facade
Number of assets	28	2
Page Complete	6.3 s	1.1 s
Network Transfer size	1097 KB	1 KB

How it works

A div with an inline SVG of the Freshdesk Messaging icon is displayed in the bottom corner - appearing just like the real thing. When a user hovers within 200 pixels of it loads the Freshdesk Messaging script. A simple animated icon is displayed as the script loads.

Quick start

Several quick start options are available:

• Download the latest release
• Clone the repo git clone https://github.com/coliff/freshdesk-messaging-facade.git
• Install with npm npm install freshdesk-messaging-facade
• Install with yarn yarn add freshdesk-messaging-facade
• Install with Composer composer require coliff/freshdesk-messaging-facade

Usage

1. Load the CSS and JS in your head:

   <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/freshdesk-messaging-facade.min.css" media="screen">
   <script src="js/freshdesk-messaging-facade.min.js" type="module" async></script>

2. Load the web component within your page:

   <freshdesk-messaging-facade id="freshdesk-messaging-facade" data-token="" data-siteid="" hidden>
     <div id="freshdesk-messaging-icon" tabindex="0" role="button" aria-label="Chat"></div>
   </freshdesk-messaging-facade>

   Add your 36-digit Freshdesk Messaging token to the data-token and your site's id to data-siteid.

   You can optionally add a data-host attribute to set the host of the widget. The default is https://wchat.freshchat.com.

Demo

https://coliff.github.io/freshdesk-messaging-facade/

FAQs

• Q. How can I customize the chat widget's color?

  A. You can modify the background-color value of #freshdesk-messaging-icon.

• Q. Can I load this from a CDN?

  A. Yep, it's available on JSDelivr.

• Q. Does it work in IE 11?

  A. No, but you can easily load the standard Freshdesk Messaging widget and add the nomodule attribute to it as a fallback for legacy browsers. View Gist

Known Issues

• Some content blockers on iOS may block the Freshdesk Messaging widget leading to the facade being non-functioning.
• The Freshdesk Messaging widget and assets are large so it can take a couple of seconds for them to load.

Credits and thanks

• This project is inspired by the Lite YouTube Embed project by Paul Irish.
• Thanks to Yoksel for the useful SVG to CSS converter