NewDesk team5 min read
A tag on every page
A support widget is the one piece of someone else’s code a business puts on every page it owns, including the checkout. It is loaded by customers who will never open it. So its weight is not a detail; it is a tax on every visit.
What ours weighs
The NewDesk widget script is about 100 KB over the wire, compressed, and that is the whole widget: the chat, the assistant, forms, bookings, the questions people ask most, and the button that reaches a person. Its stylesheet is inlined, so there is no second request for it, and it renders inside its own root so your page’s CSS and ours never meet.
What it does not load
A call is the rare thing on a support page, and the client that runs one is the heaviest part. So it is a second file, fetched the moment a call starts and not before. A page that never places a call never downloads it.
Its own icons
Icon libraries are the quiet weight in most widgets: a runtime that scans the page and fetches glyphs from a CDN, or a whole set bundled in. Ours draws only the icons it uses, cut out of the source set at build time and shipped as data with no runtime behind them. Nothing scans your page and nothing is fetched from a third party to draw a chevron.
The budget
We check the widget’s size on every build and the inlined stylesheet on every build, and we treat a growth we cannot explain as a bug. If you want to see the numbers on your own site, the network panel will show one script and, only if you place a call, one more.