How To Add Slickstream To Your Site
Slickstream is a service, so most of its code runs in the cloud and not inside your website. As a result it is not dependent on the platform on which your site is built (WordPress, SquareSpace, etc.) and can work with any of them. What is necessary is to add a small piece of code that must run every time someone visits a page on your site to establish a connection between their browser and Slickstream's servers.
We refer to this piece of code as the embed code. This embed code contains a site code that is unique to your site that Slickstream uses to determine both the configuration and contents of the various Slickstream components which load on your site.
If you are new to Slickstream and looking for a site code, please either contact us at support@slickstream.com or fill out the form on this page.
There are two ways to add the Slickstream embed code to your site.
2. If you'd prefer not to use the plugin or your site is not a WordPress site, then you can add the Slickstream embed code directly to the <head> of your site. Detailed instructions for how to do so can be found here.
For WordPress sites, what's the difference between using the plugin versus just adding the embed code directly to the <head>?
The plugin is primarily for convenience as it automatically adds the embed code to the <head> of your site so you don’t have to do it manually. There is no difference in performance between using the plugin to add the code and adding the code yourself.
Having said that, there is a small benefit to the plugin in that it provides direct access to post information from within WordPress. All the information Slickstream needs to build search results, recommendations and favorites for your site can be obtained by us crawling the page source for your pages. We do this in a similar way to Google. However, there is a small amount of information, for example, category hierarchy, that can only be obtained from within WordPress. If you use the plugin, Slickstream takes advantage of this information to augment some of the decisions on what order to display search results and recommendations.
About 75% of our WordPress customers use the plugin, and the rest manually add the code themselves.
If you have further questions on this topic, please don't hesitate to contact us at support@slickstream.com.
