An owner adds a new assistant and deactivates the old live chat plugin. He checks the home page and everything looks correct.
Three weeks later a customer mentions that there are two chat buttons on the checkout page. The old plugin left a fragment in the theme that loads independently of whether the plugin is active.
He also no longer has access to four years of transcripts, because the account was cancelled the same afternoon and nothing was exported.
1. Export everything before cancelling anything
Transcripts, canned responses, contact records, tags and reporting. Most of this becomes unreachable when an account closes and a great deal of it is genuinely useful.
2. Mine the old transcripts first
They are the single best source of what your visitors actually ask. Feeding them into the new setup produces a far better first version than any guess.
3. Understand what you are replacing
Live chat queues a visitor for a person and an assistant answers immediately, which is a different product with different expectations, as set out in the difference between a chatbot and a live chat.
4. Decide what still needs a person
Complex, sensitive and high value conversations. Keeping a route to a human being is part of the design rather than a compromise.
5. Run both briefly, on different pages
Rather than both on every page. A short overlap on separate areas lets you compare without confusing anybody.
6. Remove rather than deactivate
Deactivating leaves files and frequently leaves theme fragments. Removal and a check of the theme files is the step people skip, which is the diagnosis in plugin conflict questions wordpress owners ask.
7. Check every template, not just the home page
Checkout, account pages, landing pages and anything built with a different builder. Leftovers hide on the pages nobody reviews.
8. Clear the caches afterwards
Otherwise the old widget continues to appear for anybody served a cached page, and you will spend an afternoon on a problem you already fixed.
9. Check the mobile view specifically
Two buttons, or one in the wrong position, is most visible on a phone and least visible in a desktop review.
10. Cancel the subscription deliberately
After the export, after the removal and after checking nothing else depends on it. Cancelling first is what loses the history.
11. Redirect any notification routes
Old chat notifications going to an inbox somebody monitors will quietly stop, and nobody will notice until an enquiry is missed.
12. Keep the proactive greeting behaviour deliberate
Old live chat plugins frequently pop open after a few seconds by default, and carrying that habit across annoys visitors who were reading. Deciding when the new widget should speak first, and on which pages, is a choice worth making rather than inheriting.
12. Tell your team what changed
Anybody who handled live chat needs to know what the new escalation looks like and where conversations arrive now.
13. Check the security position of what you are adding
Access, data handling and maintenance, which is the checklist in security and update questions before installing.
14. Avoid the usual widget mistakes on the way in
Placement, timing and tone all matter more than the tool, which is the ground in mistakes saas companies make with chat widgets. See the integrations, pricing, run the numbers on the chatbot ROI calculator, and the sector view sits under small business.