How-to guides and tutorials
View All TagsTo add an AI chatbot to WordPress, install Better Messages, save an API key of OpenAI, Anthropic or Google Gemini, and create a bot under Better Messages → AI Chat Bots. The bot is free on WordPress.org and becomes a member of your messenger: people chat with it one to one, mention it in a group or chat room, or open it from a live chat button on any page.
A busy messaging site collects files fast. Every photo, screen recording, voice message and PDF that members send lands in your uploads folder, where it grows your backups, eats your hosting plan's disk and goes out through your server's bandwidth every time someone opens it. On a community with a few thousand active members that can add up to gigabytes a month.
Better Messages 3.1 can keep those files in cloud storage instead: Cloudflare R2, Bunny.net, Amazon S3, or any storage with an S3 API such as Backblaze B2, DigitalOcean Spaces or Wasabi. Members see no difference. Their files simply stop living on your server.
"Video chat on a WordPress site" can mean two different things, and the right tool depends on which one you need.
Most WordPress video chat plugins are built for the first. This guide walks through every way to add video chat to WordPress, what each one takes to set up and to run, and which one fits which kind of site.
Better Messages 3.0 is out. It is the largest release the plugin has had: every surface of the messenger was redrawn, the styling moved out of the WordPress Customizer into the plugin's own Appearance tab with a live preview, and a handful of features landed alongside it — location messages, video messages, per-conversation translation, an offline outbox, a device cache that no longer resets itself on every update, and a Mobile App page that left alpha and is now visible on the free version.
Your conversations, settings and integrations carry across untouched, including the colors and sizes you had set in the Customizer. Three things do need your attention on upgrade, and they are listed at the bottom in Updating from 2.x.
A monetized messaging platform sells the conversation itself. Visitors browse profiles for free, but sending a direct message costs points — and so does opening a new thread or placing a call. The business model is paid DMs: the platform charges per interaction, the recipient (a creator, coach, or expert) earns a share, and the user tops up a balance to keep talking. Better Messages plus a points engine (GamiPress or MyCRED) implements this on WordPress — per-message billing, per-role pricing, per-call rates, with the balance shown inside the chat.
The classic chat-rooms website — a list of topic rooms across the homepage, a public lobby for guests, a few private rooms behind a login, people drifting between them all evening — is one of the oldest layouts on the web. IRC servers, AIM rooms, and the small Java-applet chats of the early 2000s all hit the same shape. WordPress can host that site today with a single plugin and no external chat service.
Better Messages is a free WordPress live chat plugin: a visitor clicks a Live Chat button, types a name and writes to the person you choose, with no account to create. The free version delivers messages by polling every few seconds, and the WebSocket version delivers them instantly and adds calls, with every conversation kept in your own WordPress database.
An internal WordPress intranet — built on BuddyBoss, BuddyPress, FluentCommunity, Woffice, or Olympus — already hosts the employee directory, the document library, the org chart, the company announcements. What it usually doesn't host is the conversation: the day-to-day private messages, the department group chats, the live discussion when something needs to be sorted now rather than emailed. A native WordPress chat plugin adds that conversation layer inside the same intranet — one login, one inbox, one set of WordPress roles to manage.
Until this release, putting a Live Chat button onto a custom directory, a marketplace listing, or a real-estate agent profile that Better Messages didn't ship a dedicated integration for required PHP. You'd open the theme template, fetch get_the_ID(), look up a vendor user id from postmeta, build a unique tag per post, and finally call do_shortcode() with the right attributes. It worked, but every CPT meant another snippet to write and maintain.
Better Messages 2.15.9 ships a visual Shortcode Builder that does this for you. Point it at a sample listing, pick a few radio buttons, copy the resulting shortcode, paste it anywhere. The same shortcode then works for every listing of that shape — Better Messages resolves the target user, the conversation thread, and the in-chat banner against whichever listing the visitor is currently looking at.
Houzez from Favethemes is the most-installed real estate theme on the WordPress ecosystem — every Houzez site ships with property post types, agent and agency CPTs, a polished user dashboard, the Houzez Studio Elementor builder, and contact actions on every listing. What it does not ship with is a real-time chat layer that keeps a conversation on-site, with persistent history, file attachments, and the option to escalate to a call. The native contact buttons send an email, then the lead goes cold while the buyer browses the next listing. Better Messages adds a Live Chat button on every property page, every listing card, every agent and agency profile, and a Messages tab inside the Houzez dashboard — same accent color as the rest of the theme, no template overrides needed.
