AI chatbot plugin for WordPress

Yes. Optlo's plugin is on wordpress.org, reviewed by the plugin team. It adds the chat launcher to your site, and the AI agent behind it answers from your own pages, hands the conversation to your team when it should, and runs on your own AI account. Install it, connect it in a couple of clicks, and the launcher appears in the corner of your site.

Start a free trial on Optlo and give the agent your website to read. In WordPress go to Plugins, Add New, search for Optlo and activate it. Under Settings, Optlo, click Connect and approve the site from your Optlo dashboard, or paste your workspace ID. That is the whole install; no theme files are edited. The installation guide has the details.

Not to start. The 7-day trial includes AI usage, so you can install the plugin, upload your content and run real conversations first. When the trial ends you pick a plan and connect your own OpenAI, Anthropic or Google Gemini account, and the agent runs on that. You can use different models for different steps of the workflow, and switch when a better or cheaper one comes out.

The plugin is free and the trial is free for 7 days, with AI usage included and no card. There is no permanent free plan. After the trial, plans start at $16 a month on annual billing, and the AI itself is billed by your own provider at their list price, which on a mid-range model comes to a few cents per conversation.

No. The script the plugin adds to your pages is about 2 KB, measured in September 2026, and the chat window itself loads from optlo.com in its own frame, so its code is never parsed as part of your page. For comparison, WP Rocket's September 2026 test of five popular live chat widgets found each added between 188 KB and 500 KB to a blank WordPress page and between half a second and 2.4 seconds to its load time.

Yes, with no special configuration. Nothing about the visitor is written into your pages, so a cached page can never show one visitor as another. Visitors who are not signed in receive no cookie from the plugin, so caches that skip cached pages when they see a cookie keep working. Signed-in users get one cookie that identifies nobody and is never sent to Optlo.

Yes. Every conversation arrives in a shared inbox where your team can reply by hand, and a person can take over a thread the agent started at any point. What you do not get is a bot that only routes to humans: the agent answers first, and people step in for the questions it cannot handle.

On purpose. A staging site is usually a copy of the production database, which copies your workspace ID with it, and without this check every test conversation would land in your live inbox. Untick "Only load on production" under Settings, Optlo if you want it there. If you have genuinely moved domains, the same screen has a "This site moved here" button.

On pages where the messenger is on, the visitor's browser loads the script from optlo.com and opens a connection, the same as any hosted widget. Optlo receives the page address, the visitor's IP address and browser, and whatever they type. If you turn on "Identify signed-in users", the browser also passes a short-lived signed token with that user's ID, email, name and role. The plugin does not send your posts, your site content, or the accounts of users who are not signed in. The full list is in the plugin listing.

WordPress 6.0 or newer, tested up to 7.1, on PHP 7.4 or newer. Any theme or page builder, because the plugin adds one script to the page and edits nothing in your theme, so it does not care whether the page came from a block theme, Elementor or a classic template. Any page cache or CDN, with no rules to add. Signed-in users are identified with a signed, short-lived token your site issues, off by default. The same messenger installs on any other site with one snippet; the installation guide covers Shopify, Webflow, React and Astro.

Partly, and honestly: there is no WooCommerce connector yet. The agent reads your product pages like any other page, so it can answer questions about what you sell. Looking up a specific order or a customer's cart means a workflow step that calls the WooCommerce REST API through the API connector, which is something you assemble rather than switch on. Budget an afternoon for it, or tell us and we will help.

A native plugin such as WPBot or AI Engine runs inside WordPress: the bot, its settings and every AI call live on your hosting plan, and you bring your own AI key. A hosted tool such as Tidio or ChatBot.com runs the bot on its own servers and the plugin only embeds it, so you get an inbox and a team, but the AI is bundled and billed in credits. Optlo is hosted, so nothing runs on your server and your team has an inbox, and it runs on your own AI account like a native plugin does.

Yes. Use the [optlo] shortcode or the "Optlo chat button" block to put a chat button anywhere on a page. Both take a label and an opening message, so a button on your pricing page can start the conversation with "I have a question about pricing". The launcher itself can be hidden on any page by post type, URL pattern or user role.