Add an AI Chatbot to Your SiteGround Website

Set up your bot and copy your code

Create your BotDesk account and type in your website address. BotDesk reads your site and learns your services, hours and common questions on its own, so there's nothing to type in by hand. Pick what you want the bot to do and try it out. Then open the Install tab in your BotDesk dashboard and click Copy your install code. It looks like this:

<script async src="https://botdesk.studio/widget.js" data-api-key="YOUR_API_KEY" data-name="AI Assistant" data-color="#1F5AA8" data-greeting="Hi! 👋 How can I help you today?"></script>

Copy yours from the dashboard instead of typing it: your copy has your own key where this one says YOUR_API_KEY. The code carries your key and a few display settings. Everything else, like what the bot knows, your hours and where leads go, loads from your BotDesk account.

Add it to your site

WordPress on SiteGround (most sites). Use the free BotDesk AI Chat plugin: in WordPress admin go to Plugins > Add Plugin, search for BotDesk AI Chat, click Install Now, then Activate. Open Settings > BotDesk, paste your API key and save. The WordPress guide has the details, and a code snippets plugin works too. With Speed Optimizer, the plugin is the better choice, because it gives the script a name you can pick in step 3.

Plain HTML files (no WordPress). In SiteGround, open Site Tools, then Site > File Manager. In the folder list on the left open public_html, where your website's files are. Make a copy of the page first, because File Manager has no undo for deletions. Select the page, click the pencil Edit button in the top toolbar (or right-click the file and choose Edit), and paste your code just before the closing </body> tag. Click the save icon in the toolbar. Do this on each page, or once in a shared footer file if your site has one.

WordPress with Speed Optimizer: exclude BotDesk

If your WordPress site runs SiteGround's Speed Optimizer plugin, one of its settings, Combine JavaScript Files, merges scripts into a single file. The BotDesk script reads your key from its own tag on the page. Once it is merged into another file, that tag is gone and the chat has no key, so it never loads. SiteGround's own help warns that combining can break scripts that depend on order. The Defer Render-blocking JS setting did not stop the BotDesk script in our tests.

1. In WordPress admin, hover Speed Optimizer and click Frontend, then open the Javascript tab.
2. Under Exclude from Javascript Combination, click the pencil icon and add the BotDesk script. If you installed the BotDesk plugin, look for botdesk-widget. Otherwise enter https://botdesk.studio/widget.js. Confirm and save.
3. Do the same under Exclude from Javascript Minification and Exclude from Deferral of Render-blocking JS. Only combining is known to break BotDesk, but excluding all three costs you nothing.
4. Can't find it in the list, or pasted the code with a snippets plugin? Turn Combine JavaScript Files off instead. That is the safe fallback.

Plain HTML sites don't use Speed Optimizer, so skip this step there.

Clear the cache and check it's live

SiteGround keeps a saved copy of your pages, so visitors can keep seeing the old page without the chat. On WordPress, open Speed Optimizer > Caching and click Purge Cache (or click Purge SG Cache in the top admin bar). If you use SiteGround's CDN, also open Site Tools > Speed > CDN and click Cache Purge, which can take up to a minute.

On a plain HTML site, SiteGround says its static cache is flushed every 3 hours. If you don't want to wait, you can switch NGINX Direct Delivery off for the site under Site Tools > Speed > Caching.

Then reload your site in a private window. The chat bubble appears in the bottom corner. In your dashboard's Install tab, type your site's address and click Check if it's live to confirm.