How to add an AI chat to your WordPress site

What the options actually are, how to install one in a few minutes, and the part most guides skip: where the answers come from.

The short version

Decide which kind of chat you need — they are not interchangeable.
Install a chat plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory and activate it.
Connect it to an AI backend: a hosted service, or one you run yourself.
Set the greeting and a few suggested questions, then test it on a real page.

First: which kind of chat do you need?

"AI chat for WordPress" covers three different products. Picking the wrong category is the most common reason people end up disappointed with the result.

Type	What it does	Best when
Live chat / support inbox	Routes visitor messages to a human, often with an AI first responder. The value is the inbox and the people behind it.	You have someone answering messages and need ticketing, office hours and routing.
General AI assistant	Puts a general-purpose model on your site. It will happily answer questions that have nothing to do with you.	You want a novelty assistant, or you are building something custom on top of it.
Site guide	Answers using your own published pages and links to them. Its job is navigation, not conversation.	You have a lot of content — reviews, guides, a shop — and visitors cannot find the right page.

If your actual problem is "people land on my site and leave without finding the article that would have helped them", you want the third kind. Kivunly is that kind.

What you need before you start

WordPress 5.8 or newer and PHP 7.4 or newer. Most hosts are well past both.
An administrator account, so you can install plugins.
An AI backend. This is the part most guides skip: a chat plugin is only a front end. Something has to produce the answers, and that something costs money to run — whether you pay a service or pay an AI provider directly.

Step 1: install the plugin

In WordPress, go to Plugins → Add New Plugin, search for the plugin by name, then click Install Now and Activate. Plugins in the official directory are reviewed by volunteers before publication, which is a meaningful safety filter — prefer them to zip files from elsewhere.

Kivunly's listing is at wordpress.org/plugins/kivunly.

Step 2: connect a backend

There are two honest options.

Use a hosted service

You paste an endpoint URL and a site key into the plugin settings, and the service handles reading your content, calling the AI model, and paying that bill. It is the fastest path, and it means trusting a third party with the text your visitors type.

Run your own backend

If you are technical, point the plugin at your own endpoint — a small server, a serverless function, or an automation tool such as n8n or Make. You keep control of the data and pay the AI provider directly. Kivunly's request format is deliberately tiny so this is realistic to build in an afternoon; it is documented on the docs page.

Watch for this: a chat that answers from the model's general knowledge will confidently invent articles and links that do not exist on your site. That is not something you can configure away — it depends on how the backend builds its answers. We explain how to test for it in why AI chat widgets invent links.

Step 3: make it actually useful

Write a greeting that asks a question. "Hi, how can I help?" starts fewer conversations than "Tell me what you're looking for and I'll point you to the right page."
Add two or three suggested questions. Most visitors will not type anything, but they will tap. Use questions your real visitors ask.
Bottom-right is the default, but on a right-to-left site bottom-left usually reads better.
Test it on a phone. That is where most visitors are, and a panel that covers the whole screen is a different experience from one sitting in a corner.

What it costs

The plugin itself is normally free. The backend is what costs money, because every answer is a model call. Expect services to price per message or per month, and expect free tiers to be small. If you run your own backend, a small model answering a few hundred questions a month costs single-digit dollars.

Common problems

Symptom	Usually means
The bubble does not appear	The widget is not enabled, no endpoint is configured, or a caching plugin is serving an old page. Clear the cache and reload.
Answers are generic and never link to your pages	The backend is answering from the model's own knowledge instead of your content.
Links in answers lead to 404s	The backend is inventing URLs. Stop using it for recommendations until that is fixed.
The first reply is slow, later ones are fast	Normal. The backend is doing its first read of your site and caching it.
It forgets what was said earlier in a long chat	Every chat has a memory limit. Most widgets send only the last few messages to keep costs down.

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