How to Add AI Chat to Your Website in 5 Minutes

Visitors who chat with a website are 2.8x more likely to convert. AI chatbots are a fraction of the cost of a human support agent. And 73% of users now expect websites to have some form of chat support.

The technology has caught up to the promise. Modern AI chatbots use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to ground every answer in your actual website content, which mostly eliminates the hallucination problem that plagued earlier tools. Setup used to take weeks of developer time. Now it takes minutes.

Here's how to add one to your site.

What you'll need

A live, publicly accessible website
An email address for your account
About 5 minutes

That's it. No API keys, no developer tools, no database setup.

Step 1: Sign up and add your URL

Head to hej.chat and enter your email. You'll get a magic link (no password to remember). Click it, then paste your website URL.

The system claims your domain and kicks off an automatic crawl. This is where it gets interesting.

Step 2: Watch the crawl happen

Once you submit your URL, hej.chat's crawler starts working through your site:

Discovery. It follows every internal link from your homepage to map the full site structure.
Smart selection. An AI layer analyzes each page and picks the ones with real content, skipping navigation pages, login screens, and boilerplate.
Content extraction. For each selected page, it strips out headers, footers, sidebars, and ads, keeping only the actual content.
Vector indexing. The content gets chunked and converted into embeddings for semantic search.

You can watch this happen in real time. For a small site (under 50 pages), it finishes in about two minutes. Larger sites take longer but you don't need to wait around.

Step 3: Answer a few questions

After the crawl finishes, the system identifies gaps: things your website doesn't explicitly cover but visitors might ask about. It'll present 4 to 8 targeted questions like:

"What are your business hours?"
"Do you offer refunds?"
"What's the best way to contact support?"

Answer what you can, skip what you can't. These answers get folded into the AI's knowledge base and noticeably improve response quality.

Step 4: Install the widget

This is the only part that touches your website's code, and it's one line:

<script src="https://cdn.hej.chat/widget.js"></script>

Paste it before the closing </body> tag. The script auto-detects your domain and loads the right configuration. No API keys, no initialization code.

Platform-specific instructions

WordPress: Go to Appearance → Theme Editor → footer.php. Paste the script before </body>. If you use a page builder, look for a "custom code" or "footer scripts" option in your theme settings.

Shopify: Go to Online Store → Themes → Edit Code. Open theme.liquid and paste the script before </body>.

Wix: Go to Dashboard → Settings → Custom Code → Add Code. Paste the script, set it to load on all pages in the body.

Webflow: Go to Project Settings → Custom Code → Footer Code. Paste the script.

Next.js / React:

import Script from "next/script"

export default function Layout({children}) {
  return (
    <>
      {children}
      <Script src="https://cdn.hej.chat/widget.js" strategy="lazyOnload" />
    </>
  )
}

Step 5: Customize the look

Open the Studio dashboard and go to Widget settings. You can change:

Header colors to match your brand
Title and subtitle ("Hi! How can I help?" or whatever fits your tone)
Position (left or right corner)
Placeholder text in the input field

Changes apply instantly. No code updates, no redeployment.

Will this slow down my site?

Fair question. The widget script loads asynchronously and doesn't block page rendering. On Next.js you can use strategy="lazyOnload" to defer it until after the page is fully interactive. The chat bubble itself is lightweight: it only loads the full chat interface when a visitor clicks it.

What AI chat can't do (yet)

Worth being honest about the limits:

Complex, multi-step support tickets still need a human. AI chat handles the 80% of questions that have clear answers in your content. The rest should escalate.
Real-time data like order status or account details requires tool integrations (available on hej.chat's Growth plan) or a human handoff.
Sensitive situations where empathy matters more than speed. Frustrated customers sometimes just want to talk to a person.

The best approach is AI-first, human-backup. Let the chatbot handle routine questions instantly, and route the rest to your team.

What to do after launch

Most guides stop at "paste the code." But the first week after launch is where you actually make the chatbot good.

Day 1-3: Watch the logs. Go to Studio → Logs and read through the first conversations. You'll quickly see what visitors are asking about and where the AI struggles.

Day 3-7: Fill the gaps. If the chatbot can't answer something it should know, add that information. Either update your website content (the next crawl will pick it up) or answer it in the Knowledge Base section of Studio.

Week 2+: Check sentiment. The sentiment analysis dashboard shows you when visitors are frustrated, confused, or satisfied. Look for patterns. If the same topic keeps generating negative sentiment, that's your priority fix.

Monthly: Re-crawl. When you update your site content, pricing, or policies, trigger a re-crawl from Studio so the AI stays current. Starter plans include one re-crawl per day.

The numbers after 30 days

Based on industry benchmarks, here's what most sites see after adding AI chat:

5-15% of visitors engage with the chat widget
Response time drops from hours (email) to seconds
Support costs decrease 30% as routine questions get handled automatically
Conversion rates improve by roughly 23% for visitors who use chat

Your mileage will vary based on your traffic, industry, and how well your site content covers visitor questions. But the baseline improvement is consistent: faster answers, fewer support tickets, more engaged visitors.

Get started

hej.chat starts at €29/month with unlimited conversations and a 14-day free trial. No credit card required to try the demo.

Add AI chat to your site →