How to Set Up an AI Chatbot on Your Website in 30 Minutes

If your site is live and your price list is within reach, getting a chatbot up and running takes about half an hour. Most of that time is the bot reading your pages while you do something else. Everything around it is a sign up, a few settings and one line of code. This is a practical guide to how to build a chatbot for your website, whether you need a WordPress chatbot, one for a Shopify store, for Wix or for a plain HTML page. Chatbot installation is the easy part. The harder part is giving the bot good material to read.

What to have ready

• Your website address, ideally the version visitors actually land on.
• A price list, catalogue or service list as a file (PDF, Word, Excel), preferably one where you can select the text with your mouse.
• Five to ten questions customers ask you most often, with short answers.
• Admin access to your site, since that is where the code goes.
• Access to your company Facebook account if you want the bot on WhatsApp or Messenger too.

Step 1: Sign up (3 minutes)

You create an account with your company name, an email and a password, then confirm the email with a six digit code sent to that address. The trial runs for 7 days and does not ask for a card, so you can test everything before choosing a plan. A short wizard takes you straight into the next two steps.

Step 2: Point it at your website (10 to 15 minutes)

This step decides more about answer quality than anything else. You enter your address and the system walks through your pages and stores a copy of the text the bot will later search. How many pages it reads depends on the plan: Starter covers up to 100 pages, Standard 1,000, Pro 2,000 and Business 5,000. A small site of a few pages is done in a couple of minutes. A large store takes longer, and you can safely close the tab and come back.

It helps to know where the bot gets its facts, because it explains a lot later on. Your content is split into small pieces and kept in a separate store that belongs only to your company. When a visitor asks something, the bot searches that content first and builds the answer out of what it found. Its rules explicitly prevent it from claiming anything it did not find, so when it does not know, it says so and offers a contact form or a callback. In practice this means the bot is exactly as good as the material you gave it.

Step 3: Add your price list and Q&A (5 minutes)

Websites rarely contain everything. Prices often live in a PDF, delivery terms live in one colleague's head, and the warranty is written down nowhere. So after the site, upload your files and type in a handful of question and answer pairs. A few well written pairs are the best value here, because in two lines they give the exact fact the bot would otherwise hunt for across your marketing pages.

If you sell online, connect your WooCommerce or Shopify store and the bot picks up products, prices and stock levels instead of you copying them by hand. Taking orders through the chat is available from the Standard plan upwards. There is more on how that works on the AI for e-commerce page. Google Sheets, Google Docs and Google Calendar can be connected as well, so a price list you already keep in a spreadsheet can be read straight from there.

Step 4: Persona and instructions (5 minutes)

The persona is a short description: what the bot is called, what tone it uses, how long its answers are and what it does when it does not know something. Instructions are your own rules, for example always mentioning free delivery above a certain amount, or never quoting a price before a site visit.

One detail works in your favour here. Your instructions sit at the very bottom of the guidance the bot receives, and when rules contradict each other the model follows the one closer to the end. Your word wins. That is also why short beats long: three clear rules are followed far more reliably than two pages of them.

Step 5: Paste one line of code (5 minutes)

The panel gives you a short snippet. It is the same snippet everywhere, only the place you paste it changes. Refresh the site afterwards and a chat button should appear in the corner.

WordPress chatbot

The simplest route is a plugin that inserts code into the site footer (search the plugin directory for something like "header and footer scripts"). Alternatively, go to Appearance, then Widgets, and add a custom HTML widget in the footer. If you edit the theme directly, the code goes near the end of the page, just before the closing body tag. Do not paste it into a parent theme file if you have no child theme, or the next update will wipe it.

Shopify

Online Store, then Themes, then Edit code, then theme.liquid. Paste near the bottom, before the closing body tag. The chat then shows on every page of the store, product pages and cart included.

Wix

Settings, then Custom Code. Add a new snippet, set it to load on all pages and to be placed in the body. Wix requires the site to be published for the code to take effect, so do not be surprised if you cannot see it in the editor.

Plain HTML

Open the page file and paste the snippet before the end of the page. If you have several HTML files, it goes into each of them, or into a shared footer file if you use one.

One note that saves time later: your site should run over a secure connection (an address starting with https). Text chat works either way, but browsers will not grant microphone access without it, so the voice part cannot be switched on.

Step 6: Connect your channels (5 minutes)

The same bot, with the same knowledge, can answer outside your website: on WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Viber and Telegram. For the Meta channels (WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram) you connect by signing in with your company Facebook account and picking a page, with no keys to copy. Social channels are available from the Standard plan upwards. Viber is billed separately, since a Viber business account costs around 100 EUR per month and is paid to Viber, not to us.

While choosing channels, keep in mind what consumes a message from your quota: a visitor's question in the chat on your site, a message from WhatsApp, Messenger or Instagram, every visitor turn in a voice conversation, and every form submitted inside the chat. The bot's own replies are not counted separately.

Voice and appointments, if you need them

The voice agent is not a phone system. It works as a microphone button inside the chat window on your site: the visitor clicks and speaks, the bot answers out loud. There is no phone number, and it neither takes nor places calls. Phone calls are coming soon, and we will write about them once they actually work. You get ten voices and adjustable speaking speed, the conversation ends by itself after a silence period you choose (30, 45 or 60 seconds), and a single session lasts at most one hour. Audio goes straight from the visitor's browser to the service that processes it, and our server does not see it. Details are on the AI voice agent page.

By voice the bot can search your knowledge base, check which slots are free, book an appointment, read out your list of services with prices and describe a page from your site. By voice it cannot place orders, check or cancel an order, issue a payment link or check stock, and it cannot cancel or move an existing appointment. All of that runs through text chat.

Appointment booking is included on Pro and Business, or available as a 79 EUR per month add-on on lower plans. If appointments are your core business, the AI for clinics page shows how the flow is set up.

What usually goes wrong

A thin website

The most common reason for a weak bot is not the bot but a site with five pages and three sentences each. If the site never says what things cost, how long delivery takes or whether you work weekends, the bot cannot know it. The fix is not to rebuild the site, it is to write those ten facts down as question and answer pairs or upload them as a file.

Scanned PDFs and fonts without local characters

A PDF produced by a scanner is an image to the bot, not text. The same goes for catalogues whose font is missing the characters of your language, which turns words into something unreadable. The bot finds very little in such a file, so it looks as if the file is not there at all. A nightly document quality check flags this in the panel. When you get that warning, the fastest fix is retyping the content into a spreadsheet or into question and answer pairs.

Instructions that run too long

Pack too many rules into your instructions and they start contradicting each other, and the bot follows them less and less reliably. Two separate sections both claiming to be the most important one have the same effect. Keep a short list of rules that genuinely matter and let everything else be searchable content.

Staff without working hours

If you use booking and a team member has no working hours entered, the bot will always say there are no free slots for that person. That is not a bug, it is an empty calendar. Before switching booking on, check that everyone has working hours, that services have a duration and that holidays are entered.

Running out of messages

When the monthly quota is used up, the bot stops answering new questions. There is no automatic billing above the quota, so there is no unpleasant surprise on the invoice, but there are no answers either. You can buy more messages (0.05 EUR each, so 100 messages cost 5 EUR), but a top up creates an invoice with a 7 day term and the quota is added only once the payment is confirmed. Payment is by bank transfer, there is no card processor. Watch the quota in advance rather than on the day it runs out.

Checking that it works

On day one, ask it ten questions your customers really ask, including two awkward ones. After that, three things in the panel are worth a weekly look: all conversations, the list of unresolved questions (what the bot could not answer) and the answer confidence score over time. The unresolved list is the single most useful thing you will get, because it tells you exactly which content is missing. Every time you fill a gap, that list gets shorter.

What it costs

Annual payment saves 12 percent. Pro also includes 200 voice minutes and Business 1,000. If you need voice on a lower plan, a 200 minute pack costs 50 EUR one off and extra minutes are 0.25 EUR each. Chat without our signature comes with Pro and Business, or as a 29 EUR per month add-on. An extra bot is 29 EUR per month. The full list is on the pricing page.

Half an hour, in short

1. Create the account and confirm your email.
2. Enter your website address and let the bot read the pages.
3. Upload the price list or catalogue and add ten question and answer pairs.
4. Write the persona and three to five short rules.
5. Paste one line of code into your site and refresh.
6. Connect the channels you use and ask ten test questions.

If the bot still does not know something after that, it is almost always because the fact is not written down anywhere. Add it, and the bot knows it from the next question on.