Tidio Loading Speed

Since Tidio is a live chat application (a tool for interactive messaging), it needs to be loaded from a JavaScript file. Some performance testing tools may start reporting that the app slows down the page load times because of the resources it needs. Let’s check what the causes of that might be.

 

In this article, you'll learn:

• How to load the chat asynchronously
• Tidio Loading Speed - Results
• Why do you see an error about loading an external JavaScript file
• How to check the loading speed of the widget

 

Loading the chat asynchronously

 

From now on, all of our chat widgets are loading asynchronously so, it's extremely unlikely for our chat to be having any negative effect on your website loading speed or its performance in general. This basically means that it's loading independently to the most key elements of your website and it doesn't stop website parsing. The crucial resources aren't impacted and the chat goes its own pace, instead of waiting for content to be loaded first. 

 

You will find your unique javascript code with the async attribute.

 

Loading it async will ensure that no resource on the site will slow down or even stop the chat from appearing. This is especially helpful when there’s a JS error on the site, caused by another script.

 

Tidio Loading Speed - Results

 

We used LightHouse CLI to make 10 test cases with and without our widget on a clean Shopify store and calculate the difference in performance score. You can see the results of the test below:

 

 

 

Error about loading an external JavaScript file

 

Since we base the chat on our cloud servers (we wanted to take the server load off for you, giving you more resources for the website itself), we host all of the files, scripts, and content on our side. Some performance tools may see that as a potential problem, as many of them aim at loading resources locally (i.e. the tool trusts your server more than any external one). While this may have an impact on remote locations, we compensate that as much as possible by hosting the service in several OVH data centers, so no remote location is left ‘far away from the chat’ and has minimum latency. You can check where OVH has its data centers here, so you can rest assured that you’re not too far away from our servers.

 

Leveraging cache time

 

Some performance tools force the content of your website to be cached in the browser for as long as possible. While this indeed boosts performance for static content (mostly images), it won’t work well for interactive applications, making them show older content or configurations. Interactive applications also rely more on scripts, which are far more lightweight than content files, so caching them for a long time will do more harm than good (you may end up running an outdated application).

 

Checking the times yourself

 

Most of the popular performance testing tools are designed to look for ‘possible issues’ without testing the real loading speed of each element on the website. We always recommend checking how the page loads for you in real-time, by using the built-in developer tools in each web browser. To do a quick test, right-click on the website and select ‘Inspect’ to open the dev tools (the name may vary slightly, depending on the browser you’re using).

 

In the window, select the network tab, and reload the page - this will show you all the resources that are being loaded, along with the time they require to be read. You can check which elements take up the most time to appear by sorting the list by the ‘Time’ column.

 

 

You can also check how much time the chat script needs for loading the widget as well, just look up the Tidio code on the list.