How to Add a Chatbot to Your Website (Step by Step, No Code)

Adding a chatbot to your website takes far less time than most business owners expect. You don't need a developer or a month-long project to put an AI assistant on your site any more. A few paragraphs about your business, the right settings and one line of code are enough.

This guide walks through how to add a chatbot to your website from start to finish: what to prepare, how to write the instructions your chatbot follows, what to test before you go live, and how to install it on WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace or a site you built yourself. The examples use Helovo, but most of the steps apply whichever tool you choose.

Before you start: which questions should it answer?

Spend five minutes on this before you set anything up: what do customers ask you most often? Look through your inbox, your phone notes and your social media messages. For most businesses, the bulk of questions come back to the same handful of topics:

• Price: "How much is this?", "Is there a setup fee?"
• Delivery: "When will it arrive?", "Do you ship to my area?"
• Opening hours: "Are you open on Saturday?", "Are you open now?"
• Location and contact: "Where are you?", "Who should I call?"
• Returns: "Can I return it if it doesn't fit?"

Writing this list makes the chatbot's job clear. A good website chatbot isn't an assistant that knows everything; it's one that answers the recurring questions about your business quickly and correctly. The list also becomes the skeleton of the instructions you'll write in step 3.

Step 1: Create your account and your chatbot

Creating a Helovo account is free and doesn't need a credit card. After signing up, click "New chatbot" in the dashboard and enter two things:

1. Chatbot name: what you'll see in the dashboard, for example "Support Assistant".
2. Business name: the name the assistant uses to introduce itself, for example "Bloom & Stem".

The business name matters because the assistant always introduces itself with it: "I'm Bloom & Stem's virtual assistant." Even if a visitor asks "Which AI are you?", it doesn't talk about the technology behind it; it speaks for your brand.

Step 2: Add your business details

Give the chatbot the basics so it can handle the most common questions. In Helovo these are separate fields, so the assistant uses them precisely:

• Phone, email and website
• Address
• Weekly opening hours: opening and closing times for each day, so the assistant can answer "Are you open now?"
• Opening hours note: for example "Closed on bank holidays."
• Hand-off instructions: what the assistant should say when it can't answer or when a customer wants to talk to a person. For example: "For order problems, ask them to call 020 7946 0958."

That last setting is the one most businesses skip and the one that helps most. Instead of making something up, the chatbot points the customer to you; at the same time the conversation is flagged as "Handed to you" in the dashboard and you get an email. Important customers don't slip through the cracks.

Step 3: Write the chatbot's instructions

The instructions are everything your chatbot knows about your business. Well-written instructions are half of a good chatbot. In Helovo you can start from a template (customer service, sales assistant, FAQ assistant or appointment assistant) and fill in the parts in square brackets.

Good instructions cover:

• What the business does: one or two sentences.
• Products, services and prices: as a list, with exact figures.
• Policies: delivery times, shipping costs, returns, payment options.
• Limits: what the chatbot must not do. For example "Don't promise personal discounts" or "You can't look up orders; refer customers to our phone line."

An example:

You are the customer assistant for Bloom & Stem, a florist in London.

Products:
- Rose bouquet (12 stems): £45
- Orchid (double stem): £60
- Office flower subscription: weekly delivery, price on request by phone

Delivery:
- Orders placed before 4 pm are delivered the same day within London.
- Delivery costs £6.95, free on orders over £80.

Rules:
- Don't promise products that are out of stock.
- If someone asks where their order is, ask them to call 020 7946 0958.

The most common mistake is being too vague. Instead of "Help customers with shipping", write "Shipping takes 2–3 working days and is free over £50." The chatbot only uses the facts you give it; it won't guess a price you haven't written. For a deeper look at writing instructions, read our guide to AI chatbots for small businesses.

Tone and language

Next to the instructions you pick two more settings:

• Tone: professional, friendly, formal or casual.
• Language: English, Turkish, or the language each visitor writes in. If you have international customers, "visitor's language" lets the assistant reply to a French or Spanish speaker in their own language.

Step 4: Make it look like your site

The chat window should feel like part of your website. The main settings:

• Main colour: your brand colour, used for the button and header; the text colour is picked automatically so it stays readable.
• Avatar and chat icon
• Welcome message: for example "Hi! 👋 Ask me anything about orders, delivery or our flowers."
• Position: bottom right or bottom left.
• Footer: an optional short line and link under the window, such as your own brand name.

No platform branding appears in the window; visitors only see your business.

Step 5: Test before you go live

Chat with your bot in the dashboard's Test tab. Don't skip this: a few minutes of testing keeps wrong answers off your website. Try at least:

1. Your top 10 questions: the ones from your list. Are the answers correct and short enough?
2. Something it doesn't know: ask about a product you didn't mention. Does it point you to the business instead of inventing an answer?
3. Asking for a person: type "I want to talk to someone." Does it follow your hand-off instructions?
4. An off-topic request: "Write me a poem" or "Fix this code." It should politely decline and bring the chat back to your business.
5. An identity question: "Are you ChatGPT?" It should introduce itself as your business's assistant.

If an answer isn't what you expected, adjust the instructions and try again. The cause is usually missing information: if the chatbot says something wrong, that topic probably isn't clear enough in the instructions.

Step 6: Add the code to your website

On the install screen you first add the domain the chatbot will run on (for example bloomandstem.co.uk). The chatbot only opens on sites you allow, so even if someone copies your code, it won't work on their site. Then you get one line of code:

<script src="https://api.helovo.com/widget.js" data-bot="pk_…" async></script>

Paste it on every page of your site, just before the closing </body> tag. Here's where that is on the most common platforms:

WordPress

The easiest way is a code-snippet plugin such as WPCode or "Insert Headers and Footers". Paste the code into the plugin's footer section and save. Editing your theme's footer.php also works, but a theme update can remove the change, so a plugin is safer.

Shopify

In your admin, go to Online Store → Themes → ⋯ → Edit code, open theme.liquid and paste the code just above the </body> line.

Wix

Go to Settings → Custom Code, add new code, and choose "All pages" and "Body - end". Custom code requires your site to be connected to its own domain.

Squarespace

Go to Settings → Advanced → Code Injection and paste the code into the Footer box. Code injection isn't included in every Squarespace plan, so if you don't see it, check what your plan offers.

A site you built yourself

Add the code to your shared layout template, before </body>. If your site uses a Content Security Policy, add the chatbot's address to your script-src and connect-src rules.

Step 7: Go live and watch the first week

After adding the code, set the chatbot's status to "Active". With Helovo, setting up and testing is free; you start a subscription when you want the chatbot to talk to visitors on your site. You'll find the current options on the pricing page.

During the first week, glance at the Conversations page every day and look for two things:

• Conversations handed to you: questions the chatbot couldn't answer. They're a list of facts to add to your instructions.
• Recurring questions: if an unexpected question keeps coming up, add the answer to your instructions.

After a few weeks of these small improvements, your chatbot will answer most of your customers' questions on its own.

My chatbot isn't showing up: common fixes

• Status isn't "Active": a draft or paused chatbot doesn't appear on your site.
• The domain doesn't match: www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com are different addresses. Check which one your site opens on and add it; add both if needed.
• The code is in the wrong place: if you added it to a single page, it won't appear on the others. Put it somewhere that runs on every page.
• Caching: if your site uses a caching plugin, clear the cache.
• Browser console: open your browser's console (F12) and look for warnings starting with "[Helovo]"; they usually say exactly what's wrong.

Summary

Adding a chatbot to your website is no longer a technical project. It's a content job: knowing what your customers ask and writing the answers clearly. In short:

1. List your most common questions.
2. Add your business details and hand-off instructions.
3. Write clear instructions with real figures.
4. Match the look to your brand.
5. Test with tricky questions.
6. Paste one line of code on every page.
7. Learn from the first week's conversations and refine.

Still have questions? See our FAQ. If you're deciding between an AI chatbot and a live chat team, read chatbot vs live chat.