How To Add Facebook Messenger To Your Website

February 20, 2020

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Did you know that Facebook Messenger is expected to grow to 2.4 billion users by 2021?

You can now integrate your Messenger experience directly into your website.

The Messenger Customer Chat plugin allows you to have a live conversation with your site visitors. This allows your website visitors and customers to interact with your business anytime with the same personalized, rich-media experience they get in Facebook Messenger.

The plugin is very easy to use. It is one of the few free tools available and has the benefit of being simple and easy to install on WordPress.

Besides being a low-cost live chat plugin, it is a fantastic tool for improving conversions on your website. All messages appear in your Facebook messenger system. You will be able to access them and respond to them easily.

How To Install The Facebook Customer Chat Plugin (from Facebook’s help desk)

To add the customer chat plugin on your website, you can either use the setup tool or set it up using the developer steps.

Option 1: Setup Tool

For Page Admins, the Page settings provide an easy setup tool for customizing your customer chat plugin. To use the setup tool, do the following:

Whitelist the domain of your website
For security reasons, the plugin will only render when loaded on a domain that you have whitelisted.
Domains must meet the following requirements to be whitelisted:
– Served over HTTPS
– Use a fully qualified domain name, such as https://www.messenger.com/. IP addresses and localhost are not supported for whitelisting.
Include the plugin on your webpage
To add the plugin to your webpage, include a div with the following attributes in your HTML:
By default, the greeting dialogue will be shown on desktop and mobile.
To customise the greeting dialogue behaviour, you can use the greeting_dialog_display and ‘greeting_dialog_delay’ attributes.
Optional. Handle the messaging_postbacks event for new conversations
If your bot has the ‘get started’ button set up and a user starts a conversation via the plugin by clicking the ‘get started button’, we will send a ‘messaging_postbacks webhook event’ to your webhook.

If the ref attribute is set in the include for the customer chat plugin, it will be included in the postback event.

Optional. Handle the messaging_referrals event for existing conversations
For existing conversations, if the ref attribute is set in the include for the customer chat plugin, a messaging_referrals webhook event will be sent to your webhook when the conversation is continued via the plugin.

The ref can be any string and can be used for a variety of purposes. For example, you could use it to keep track of which customers have engaged with your business via the plugin.

Here are the reasons why a Facebook Messenger widget is better than live chat

If the website visitor or user is already logged in to their Facebook account, they will be able to start chatting with your bot right away. If they are not logged in, a default welcome message will be displayed, and they will be prompted to log in or create a new Facebook account.
If your Page has age or country restrictions set in Page settings, the customer chat plugin will not render for users who are not logged into their Facebook account when they visit your website.
All your conversations are saved in Facebook Inbox. The greeting dialogue state is cached on the browser and persists even when the browser is closed and reopened. You can pick up a conversation with a user who chatted with you even if they left your website. This plugin will always default to the last state the user left the plugin based on the browser cache.
The greeting dialogue will be shown on desktop and mobile. Users may click the close button to minimize the dialogue or you can override the request default with your own display preferences.
You can detect the message’s origin. It may be necessary to determine whether a user is engaging with your business using the customer chat plugin.
You can use Facebook Messenger Plugin as a new communication channel with your audience.

Having trouble getting the plugin to show properly? Try these tips below

If you see a console error like “Refused to display *** in a frame because an ancestor violates the following Content Security Policy directive: ***”, check that the domain of the page in which the plugin is being rendered on has been whitelisted. Also, make sure you didn’t set the Referrer-Policy header to no-referrer.
The Firefox Facebook Container Add-On prevents the plugin from showing up. Remove the add on if you want the plugin to render.
Firefox desktop private browsers (version 63 and above) and Firefox mobile browsers block content tracking by default which will prevent the plugin from rendering. Turn off content blocking (click the grey shield in the search bar) to see the plugin render.
Do your research or read the recent reviews and support threads. Facebook may have unannounced changes and may break third-party plugins.