Live chat or chatbot for a small business website

Start with who answers

A chat button makes a promise. A visitor who clicks it expects a reply while they are still on the page. Before you pick a tool, write down who gives that reply, in which hours, and what happens to a question sent at 11 pm on a Sunday.

If the honest answer is "me, when I'm not with a client", some options are out before you start. Here are five, from the least work for you to the most.

Five ways to handle questions on your site

1. A contact form only. The visitor writes, you reply by email. Nothing is lost while you are away, and the only promise is the one you write next to the form.
2. An AI bot that answers from your pages and passes the rest to you. It answers what your site already says, at any hour. Everything else reaches you by email with the conversation attached, and you reply when you reply to other email.
3. Live chat with an offline form. The chat shows as online during your hours and turns into a message form outside them. Visitors get fast replies while you are there, so you have to be there.
4. Live chat all day, answered by you. Fast for the visitor. You are on call for every hour the button says online.
5. A bot first, then a person joins the same chat. This is what support teams run. The bot takes the simple questions and someone takes over the conversation live, which needs someone free to take over.

If you work alone, pick option 2 and keep a contact form on your contact page. The bot covers nights and weekends without pretending you are at your desk, and the form is there for people who would rather write a proper message. Move to option 3 when you have set hours you really spend at a screen. Option 5 makes sense once a second person has the chat as part of their job.

How fast people expect a reply in a chat

The published numbers on chat speed come from companies with support staff. Read them as what your visitors get used to on other sites, not as a bar you have to clear on your own.

• Comm100, a live chat vendor, analysed more than 220 million chats on its own platform for its 2025 benchmark report. In 2024 visitors waited 23.6 seconds on average before an agent picked up the chat, and teams of one to five agents averaged 24.6 seconds.
• SuperOffice sent one question by live chat to 1,000 company websites in the US and Europe, only during their support hours and only when the chat showed as online. 21% of those chats got no answer at all. The average wait was 2 minutes 40 seconds, and the longest was 9 minutes.

The second study is the one to remember. About one in five companies with an online chat button did not answer it. A visitor who waits two minutes and leaves thinks less of you than one who filled in a form and got a reply the next morning.

Senja, a testimonial tool run by two founders, turned its live chat off. Its founder wrote that replies ranged from a 40-minute live conversation one day to a 6-day wait the next. They moved to email tickets and a fuller help centre: "We want people to fix their own issues" (Senja blog).

What live chat costs you in hours

The typing is the small part. Comm100's chats lasted 8 minutes 50 seconds on average in 2024. Five chats a day would be about 45 minutes of typing.

The big part is being reachable. To reply within a minute or two, you have to sit near a screen for every hour the chat shows as online and drop what you are doing when it pings. A weekday from 9 to 5 is 40 hours a week on call, whether five people write or nobody does. A therapist in a session or a plumber under a sink cannot do that.

A bot with a hand-off moves the work to times you choose. Setting it up means adding your pages and testing it with questions you write in advance. After that, you answer hand-offs from your inbox like any other message. Once a week, read the list of questions the bot could not answer and add the missing facts to your site.

What an AI chatbot must never do

An AI bot on your site speaks for your business, and a visitor can screenshot anything it says. Before you turn one on, check that it will not do these things.

• Make up an answer. If your pages do not say whether you deliver on Saturdays, the bot should say it does not know, not guess "yes".
• Promise a refund, a discount or a date. A bot that tells someone they will get their money back has made a promise in your name. Refunds, billing disputes and delivery dates belong with you.
• Say it did something it cannot do. "I've cancelled your order" from a bot that cannot touch orders is worse than no answer.
• Pass itself off as a person. Say in the greeting that it is an automatic assistant and how the visitor reaches you.

Formgong's help chat is instructed to answer only from your pages and the facts you add, and never to guess features, prices, limits or dates. It is told never to claim it took an action, and to send people who want a person or have a billing dispute to the hand-off button. When it finds nothing, it replies: "I couldn't find this in the site's pages, so I won't guess." It answers in the visitor's language (12 are supported). You can change the greeting in the bot's settings, so write there that it is a bot.

Instructions lower the risk, and testing shows whether they hold on your pages. How the bot finds its answers, and a 20-question test to run before it goes live, are in AI chatbot that answers only from your website.

How the hand-off to you should work

The hand-off is the moment the bot stops and you take over. The visitor should not have to type the question again, and you should not have to check yet another app to see it.

In Formgong, the visitor presses "Talk to a human", leaves an email and ticks consent. The conversation arrives as a submission of the form you choose, so it lands where your other messages do: your Formgong inbox, email, or Telegram. With no form chosen, it comes by email with Reply-To set to the visitor, and you answer by pressing Reply.

If you want numbered tickets, turn on support tickets for the bot. The button becomes "Create a ticket", and the visitor gets a receipt by email with a status link and the reply time you set, such as "I reply within one working day". If you leave that field empty, the receipt says "We usually reply within 24 hours", so set your own. The free plan includes 20 tickets a month.

Formgong has no live view where you type into the visitor's chat while they wait. For options 3 to 5 above, use a tool built around live chat. Read the unhappy reviews before you pay: in the recent 1-star reviews of ten AI support chatbots we read, billing came up more often than wrong answers.

What we saw on the sites writing about chat

On 1 November 2026 we opened the home pages of the six companies whose blogs we found writing about chat support and looked for a chat button. One of six showed one: Fillout, with Intercom. Trustindex loaded the scripts of a Zoho Desk help widget but showed no button in our window. Formspree, Senja, Judge.me and EmbedSocial showed none. That was one visit per home page in a narrow browser window, without accepting cookie banners, so a chat may still appear on other pages.

The articles point the same way. Formspree's suggests a chatbot plus live chat if you can staff it, and a contact form button if you cannot. Senja switched its chat off. Formgong runs option 2 on its own site: the help chat on every page, tickets for what it cannot answer, and a reply within 2 business days promised on the support page.

Tell us what you chose

Did you add live chat to your site and keep it, or switch it off after a month? We would like to hear what worked for you, especially if you run the business alone. Write to support@formgong.com, and tell us if anything on this page is out of date.

What Formgong's free plan includes

• Build the form or bring your own. The form builder takes the colours and fonts from your site's address, with no sign-up; ready form templates copy into your account; AI writes the fields from one sentence. Any hand-written HTML form works too.
• Websites with the form already connected. 28 free website templates post to Formgong out of the box.
• 250 submissions a month on unlimited forms. Spam does not count. Once a year, a busy month keeps delivering on credit until the 7th instead of stopping.
• Everywhere you work. Email to up to 3 people at once, Telegram with Reply and Handled buttons, Google Sheets, Notion, and 3 signed webhooks for Slack, Discord, Zapier, Make or n8n.
• Emails to your customers in your business's name. Formgong sends them under your business name and replies come back to you, with no email service of your own to set up: a review request to every lead, a reminder a visitor asked for, and review emails after an order with your logo and colours. People who agree can also go straight into your Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Brevo, MailerLite or Kit list. An automatic reply to each visitor is on Pro.
• No captcha needed. A server-side spam filter, a honeypot, allowed domains and a block list; add your own Turnstile key if you want one.
• Files and voice. Visitors can attach files, or record a voice message that arrives transcribed.
• Made for AI-built sites. A hosted form page and a contact button; step-by-step guides for sites built with Lovable, Bolt, v0, Replit and Base44; an MCP server lets Cursor or Claude wire the form for you.
• See what the form does. Analytics for views, starts, conversion and where each lead came from, and an alert when a form goes quiet.
• One account for the rest. Customer reviews and an AI help chat that answers visitors from your own pages, with every message in one inbox. Data is stored in the EU.