About this plugin
Vago Chat adds a front-end chat widget to your site and a real-time
agent dashboard, so you can talk to visitors as they browse — and turn
those conversations into sales.
Chat & CRM
- Front-end chat widget with a proactive greeting, quick-reply buttons, emoji picker, and file/image attachments.
- Real-time agent dashboard: conversation list, live visitor monitoring, and one-click invites to visitors currently browsing.
- CRM pipeline per conversation: lead status (new/contacted/qualified/won/lost), assignment to a specific team member, contact info, tags, private notes, and a visitor’s previous session history.
- Live typing preview — see what a visitor is typing before they hit send.
- Right-click a conversation to move it to trash, delete it permanently, or block the visitor.
Automation
- Canned responses and a keyword-matched FAQ auto-bot that answers common questions instantly and hands off to a human for anything it doesn’t recognize.
- Smart proactive triggers: automatically message a visitor after N seconds on a page, based on their traffic source, or once their WooCommerce cart reaches a value you set.
Sales (WooCommerce)
- Agents can search your product catalog from the reply box and send a rich product card (photo, price, “Add to cart” button) straight into the chat.
- One-click “Send checkout link” button for visitors who are ready to buy.
Reports
- A GA-style Reports view: a trend chart of chats/messages over time, per-agent leaderboard, lead-status and channel breakdowns, average first-response time, and missed-chat count.
Team & access
- Grant Vago Chat access to any user without making them a full site administrator (Settings → Members).
- Open the exact same dashboard at a friendly URL outside of wp-admin (Settings → External Access) — logging in there still uses your normal WordPress account, there is no separate login system.
- Appearance settings let you set a brand color once and have it apply to both the dashboard and the widget.
Channels
- Optional Telegram integration — connect a bot token and Telegram conversations appear in the same dashboard alongside your website chats. (WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger all require a verified Meta Business account for API access and aren’t included.)
Performance & architecture
- Chat data is stored in a self-contained SQLite database under wp-content/uploads/vago-chat/ — no additional MySQL tables are created.
- A companion standalone chat-api.php endpoint serves the widget and dashboard directly (bypassing admin-ajax.php ) for lower latency; it authenticates every request with a random token or an origin/referrer check.
- CSS and JS are separate enqueued files (cacheable by the browser), not inline <style> / <script> blocks.
- Report queries are cached for 60 seconds and SQLite runs PRAGMA optimize periodically; a manual “Optimize database” action is available for on-demand VACUUM.
External services
com solely to resolve a visitor’s IP address to
an approximate city/country, so agents can see where a visitor is chatting
from. Only the visitor’s IP address is sent to this service, and the
result is cached for 24 hours to minimize requests.
- Service: ip-api.com
- Data sent: the visitor’s IP address
- When: once per visitor per 24 hours, on their first page view
- Terms of service: https://ip-api.com/docs/legal
- This lookup can be disabled by removing the geo lookup call in includes/api/handlers-visitor.php ( _ip_geo() ).
If you enable Web Push notifications for new chats, browser push messages
g. Google
or Mozilla’s push endpoints) using the standard, plugin-generated VAPID
keys — no third-party account or API key is required.
If you opt in to the Telegram integration (Settings → Channels) by
entering your own bot token, messages sent by visitors through that
Telegram bot, and your agents’ replies, are relayed through Telegram’s
org) — this only happens if you’ve supplied a bot
token and clicked “Connect”.
- Service: Telegram Bot API
- Data sent: message text and the visitor’s Telegram chat ID
- When: only when the Telegram integration is connected and in use
- Terms of service: https://telegram.org/tos