We recently announced that our v2 feedback widget is now available for all our customers.
The improvements we made fall into two categories:
- User interface improvements
- Performance improvements
In this article, I’ll go into detail about the performance improvements.
Our feedback button is much faster
When I say that our feedback button is much faster, what do I mean by “faster”?
This is what I mean: the feedback button that floats on the side of your website is now visible and ready to click much quicker than before.
In most cases it will seem to be instantly available to your website visitors.
How our v1 feedback button worked
Anytime a visitor viewed a page on your website that contained our feedback button, here’s what happened:
- Our Javascript snippet embedded on your site would contact our server.
- Our server would query our database to make sure your API key was valid.
- Our server would decide whether to build a custom version of our feedback widget for your site, or whether to reuse the same custom widget it made for your website previously.
- Our server would send the custom widget to your site.
- Finally, the widget would run on your website visitor’s browser, causing the feedback button to appear.
The process worked well, but there were problems:
- This entire process sometimes (although rarely) took several seconds.
- Every customer had a custom version of the widget, which made it impossible to use a content delivery network.
- We couldn’t use modern browser caching technology to speed things up.
How our v2 feedback button works
Our new button takes a different approach. The widget is the same for all users. This means:
- There’s no time spent building the widget on demand.
- We can use a content delivery network and aggressive in-browser caching.
- When a visitor comes to your website for the first time, our widget needs to be downloaded, but just once. We’ve done everything we can to make this as fast as possible.
As your customer browses through your website or navigates through your app, our widget remains cached on the user’s computer, and doesn’t need to be fetched again.
The widget still needs to check your API key by contacting our server. But it is a quick check, performed directly from your user’s computer to our server. It returns just the bare minimum info needed to configure the feedback button and form correctly for your users.
Want to start using our v2 widget? Learn how to install our V2 widget here.