Description
Vago Chat adds a front-end chat widget to your site and a real-time
agent dashboard, so you can talk to visitors as they browse — and turn
those conversations into sales.
Chat & CRM
- Front-end chat widget with a proactive greeting, quick-reply buttons, emoji picker, and file/image attachments.
- Real-time agent dashboard: conversation list, live visitor monitoring, and one-click invites to visitors currently browsing.
- CRM pipeline per conversation: lead status (new/contacted/qualified/won/lost), assignment to a specific team member, contact info, tags, private notes, and a visitor’s previous session history.
- Live typing preview — see what a visitor is typing before they hit send.
- Right-click a conversation to move it to trash, delete it permanently, or block the visitor.
Automation
- Canned responses and a keyword-matched FAQ auto-bot that answers common questions instantly and hands off to a human for anything it doesn’t recognize.
- Smart proactive triggers: automatically message a visitor after N seconds on a page, based on their traffic source, or once their WooCommerce cart reaches a value you set.
Sales (WooCommerce)
- Agents can search your product catalog from the reply box and send a rich product card (photo, price, “Add to cart” button) straight into the chat.
- One-click “Send checkout link” button for visitors who are ready to buy.
Reports
- A GA-style Reports view: a trend chart of chats/messages over time, per-agent leaderboard, lead-status and channel breakdowns, average first-response time, and missed-chat count.
Team & access
- Grant Vago Chat access to any user without making them a full site administrator (Settings Members).
- Open the exact same dashboard at a friendly URL outside of wp-admin (Settings External Access) — logging in there still uses your normal WordPress account, there is no separate login system.
- Appearance settings let you set a brand color once and have it apply to both the dashboard and the widget.
Channels
- Optional Telegram integration — connect a bot token and Telegram conversations appear in the same dashboard alongside your website chats. (WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger all require a verified Meta Business account for API access and aren’t included.)
Performance & architecture
- Chat data is stored in a self-contained SQLite database under
wp-content/uploads/vago-chat/— no additional MySQL tables are created. - A companion standalone
chat-api.phpendpoint serves the widget and dashboard directly (bypassingadmin-ajax.php) for lower latency; it authenticates every request with a random token or an origin/referrer check. - CSS and JS are separate enqueued files (cacheable by the browser), not inline
<style>/<script>blocks. - Report queries are cached for 60 seconds and SQLite runs
PRAGMA optimizeperiodically; a manual “Optimize database” action is available for on-demandVACUUM.
External services
This plugin uses ip-api.com solely to resolve a visitor’s IP address to
an approximate city/country, so agents can see where a visitor is chatting
from. Only the visitor’s IP address is sent to this service, and the
result is cached for 24 hours to minimize requests.
- Service: ip-api.com
- Data sent: the visitor’s IP address
- When: once per visitor per 24 hours, on their first page view
- Terms of service: https://ip-api.com/docs/legal
- This lookup can be disabled by removing the geo lookup call in
includes/api/handlers-visitor.php(_ip_geo()).
If you enable Web Push notifications for new chats, browser push messages
are delivered through your visitors’ configured push service (e.g. Google
or Mozilla’s push endpoints) using the standard, plugin-generated VAPID
keys — no third-party account or API key is required.
If you opt in to the Telegram integration (Settings Channels) by
entering your own bot token, messages sent by visitors through that
Telegram bot, and your agents’ replies, are relayed through Telegram’s
Bot API (api.telegram.org) — this only happens if you’ve supplied a bot
token and clicked “Connect”.
- Service: Telegram Bot API
- Data sent: message text and the visitor’s Telegram chat ID
- When: only when the Telegram integration is connected and in use
- Terms of service: https://telegram.org/tos
Installation
- Upload the
vago-chatfolder to/wp-content/plugins/, or install the zip via Plugins Add New Upload Plugin. - Activate Vago Chat through the ‘Plugins’ screen in WordPress.
- A new Vago Chat menu item appears in your wp-admin sidebar — open it to set your agent name, avatar, and greeting.
- The chat widget will automatically appear in the front end of your site.
Nginx / LiteSpeed: protecting the chat database
This plugin writes a .htaccess file into wp-content/uploads/vago-chat/
to block direct access to the SQLite database and every .json file there
(settings, generated config, VAPID keys — a .php extension is blocked too,
defensively, though nothing in the plugin writes one). Apache and LiteSpeed
(LiteSpeed reads .htaccess natively for Apache compatibility) honor this
automatically. Nginx ignores .htaccess entirely — if your site runs on
Nginx, add a rule like this to your server block so those files stay private:
location ^~ /wp-content/uploads/vago-chat/ {
location ~* \.(db|db-wal|db-shm|json|php)$ { deny all; return 404; }
}
The plugin also shows an admin notice automatically when it detects Nginx.
FAQ
-
Does this create new database tables?
-
No. Conversations, visitors, and messages are stored in a SQLite database
file insidewp-content/uploads/vago-chat/, not in your WordPress
(MySQL) database. -
Who can access the chat dashboard?
-
Administrators always have access. You can grant access to other users
without making them administrators from Settings Members — they get a
narrow “Vago Chat Agent” capability, nothing more. -
Can agents use the dashboard without going into wp-admin?
-
Yes. Settings External Access lets you open the same dashboard at a
short URL likeexample.com/live-chat-agent/. Logging in there uses
wp_signon() — WordPress’s own login function — so it’s the same
authentication as wp-admin, just without the wp-admin chrome around it. -
What happens to my data if I uninstall the plugin?
-
Deleting the plugin from the Plugins screen removes its settings and the
SQLite chat database/uploaded files. Deactivating the plugin does not
delete anything.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“Vago Chat” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
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Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.0.0
- Initial release: real-time chat widget and agent dashboard, live visitor monitoring, smart proactive triggers, a keyword-matched FAQ auto-bot, a CRM pipeline with agent routing, WooCommerce sales quick-actions, a real-time Reports control center, Members/Blocklist management, an external agent portal, and an optional Telegram channel.