Widget performance
How heavy is the LiveChat chat widget?
DebugBear measured it at 385KB. Here is what that means for your page, how it compares, and how to check your own installation.
Last checked 1 September 2026
Widget size/LiveChat
The short answer
How big is the LiveChat chat widget?
DebugBear measured the LiveChat chat widget at 385KB of download. That places it 4 of 7 among the mainstream widgets they tested, which ranged from 79KB to 749KB. For scale, that is roughly 15 times the 26KB TGLiveChat widget.
What LiveChat is
One of the oldest dedicated live chat products, sold per agent.
How it compares
| Widget | Download | JS execution |
|---|---|---|
| Tawk.to | 749 KB | Not published |
| Zendesk Chat | 533 KB | 991 ms |
| Drift | 464 KB | Not published |
| LiveChat | 385 KB | Not published |
| Intercom | 301 KB | Not published |
| Crisp | 155 KB | Not published |
| LiveAgent | 79 KB | Not published |
| TGLiveChat | ~26 KB | not in the test |
Competitor figures are DebugBear's, updated 10 November 2025. The TGLiveChat figure is our own measurement, with the method on the widget size page.
Where LiveChat is the better choice
Mature, dependable and built for teams that staff chat as an actual job, with routing, shifts and reporting to match.
Where we are different
No per agent charge, so adding people to the Telegram group costs nothing.
Worth being plain about the trade: TGLiveChat is not a helpdesk. There is no ticketing, no SLA engine, no assignment rules and no reporting suite. If you were using those, a lighter widget is not a saving, it is a downgrade. If you were not, you were carrying the weight of a product you never opened.
Measuring your own installation
Every published figure, including ours, is somebody else's configuration. Open DevTools, go to the Network tab, filter by the vendor domain and hard reload. Read the transfer column, not the resource size column. Then look at the Performance tab for scripting time. Two minutes, and it is the only number that describes your site.
The bottom line
LiveChat downloads 385KB. Whether that is a problem depends entirely on what you get for it. A heavy widget attached to a helpdesk your team lives in is a fair trade. A heavy widget attached to a chat bubble nobody answers is not.
Defer it before you replace it. That is the cheaper fix and it usually works.
Frequently asked questions
How big is the LiveChat chat widget?
Does the LiveChat widget hurt Core Web Vitals?
How do I make LiveChat load faster?
How do I measure this myself?
Is there a lighter alternative to LiveChat?
What does LiveChat do well?
Sources and references
- DebugBear: How Do Different Chat Widgets Impact Site Performance? Published 14 July 2019, updated 10 November 2025. Source of the LiveChat figures on this page.
- Google: Core Web Vitals What widget weight actually affects, and how.
- Chrome DevTools: Network reference The transfer versus resource size distinction used above.
Measurements of LiveChat belong to DebugBear and are cited for comparison. We measure our own widget and nobody else's.