At Drift we are constantly working on improving our chat widget to provide your site visitors with a great experience. Based on customer feedback we are releasing an update to the widget that will help reduce the size of the widget file as well as the impact it has on your website. Due to the nature of these changes, Drift orgs that use custom widget implementation may need to make some changes to their widget codes in order for the widget to continue to work as expected.

9/15/2023 UPDATE:  

Update: Our internal teams have recently discovered that the code changes (noted below) may not be necessary to realize these performance improvements.  We ask that you refrain from making any alterations to your installation at this time, as we are actively reviewing the opportunity and will provide further guidance once confirmed.  Thank you for your understanding and patience.

What is changing?

• Fewer API and network requests: The widget is now more efficient in the number of API and network requests it makes, so it will be less burdensome and resource heavy on one’s website.
• Removed duplicate file fetches: We have removed redundant file fetches within the widget, which therefore makes it more operationally efficient.
• Simplified HTML structure (i.e. “single frame” update): The widget has also seen updates in how the file itself is structured—all designed to reduce the weight of the widget itself.

Do I need to take action? 

To make this improvement, we’ll be consolidating the html structure that the widget creates on your page. Any code referencing

drift-frame-chat

or

drift-frame-controller

will need to be updated, as they are being consolidated into a single element moving forward—

drift-frame-chatWidget

—and will stop working once this change is live. If your Drift widget installation does not reference either of these frames—something common among standard installation types—there is no action needed on your side.

Will there be any changes to the Javascript SDK?
There are no changes to our Javascript API. Please refer to our list of events if you need to make any changes: https://devdocs.drift.com/docs/drift-events.