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Add-on

Messages that arrive the moment they are sent

Realtime replaces the constant “anything new yet?” polling behind your chat, notifications and feeds with a single live connection — so updates appear instantly and your server stops doing the work.

WebSocket delivery over the Memberside global network
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Free while in beta. No credit card needed.

The problem

Your site is answering questions nobody asked

Every live feature in a WordPress community works by asking, over and over, whether anything has changed. Each of those questions is a full WordPress request, and nearly all of them come back empty.

every 4 seconds

An open chat asks again, and again

While a conversation is on screen the app re-asks your site for new messages every few seconds — for every participant, in every open thread. Almost every one of those requests comes back with nothing new.

every 15 seconds

A feed re-downloads itself

The news feed refetches thirty full posts — author, reactions, link previews and all — four times a minute, whether or not anything was posted. An open comment thread does the same with fifty comments.

every page, every visitor

The bell polls in the background

On your website the notification counter runs on a timer for every logged-in visitor, on every page they open, for as long as they stay.

Two hundred members with chat and a feed open is thousands of requests a minute, all of them asking the same question. Realtime answers it once, when the answer changes.

What changes

Instant for members, quieter for your server

It arrives when it happens

A message, a reply or a notification reaches the screen in well under a second, instead of whenever the next poll happens to come round.

Your server stops answering questions nobody asked

A member in a chat thread costs your site about 35 requests a minute without it, and under one with it. On our own community site the Better Messages new-message check fell from 7,678 requests a week to 108. Each of those requests was a full WordPress load; now your site only does work when there is work.

Kinder to phones

One quiet connection instead of a timer waking the radio every few seconds, and nothing at all while the app sits in the background — push covers that. Members get the battery and the mobile data back.

Your members’ messages never touch our servers

We deliver a signal that something changed — never the thing itself. The message is fetched from your site, by your app, over your own API, under your own permission rules. We could not read your community’s conversations if we wanted to.

It degrades, it does not break

If the connection drops, or your subscription lapses, apps quietly fall back to checking on a timer exactly as they do today. Nothing errors and nobody sees a broken screen.

Your website too, not just the app

The notification bell and Ultimate Member messaging go live for people browsing your site in a browser, whether or not you have published a mobile app.
Two members of a demo community in one conversation: each sees the other typing, and every message lands the moment it is sent

What goes live

One connection, every live surface

Members hold a single connection no matter how many of these you use — it is one socket per person, not one per screen.

  • Notifications

    The notification centre and the unread bell badge, in the app and on your website.

  • Chat

    Ultimate Member messaging, Better Messages and BuddyPress private messages — threads, the inbox and unread counts, plus Sent, Delivered and Seen ticks that change the moment a message is read.

  • News feed & comments

    New posts announced as they land, with reactions and comment counts updating in place.

  • Group discussions

    Ultimate Member group walls, delivered only to members who are allowed to read them.

  • BuddyPress activity

    Sitewide and per-group activity streams.

    These do not refresh on their own today, so here Realtime adds liveness rather than removing load.

  • Who’s online

    A live green dot on the avatar of every member who has the app open, on every screen that shows members. Members can hide their own status, and blocked members never see each other.

    Answered by the connection itself, so it costs your site no requests at all.

On memberside.app

See how busy your community gets

Your plan's ceiling, this month's peak of members connected at once, and how many updates your site sent — on your account page, beside the domains you have connected.

The Realtime page on memberside.app: a peak of 198 simultaneous connections this month out of 2,500, and charts of peak connections and events published over thirty days
Sample usage history on a demo community

How it works

Three steps, then nothing to think about

  1. Step 1

    Approve your domain

    One click from your WordPress admin. The site gets its own credential — no keys to copy and nothing to paste into a config file.
  2. Step 2

    Your site announces changes

    When a message is sent or a post appears, WordPress sends a short signal to the edge. It is fire-and-forget, so it never slows down the page your member is waiting on.
  3. Step 3

    Everyone sees it at once

    Apps and browsers holding a connection update immediately. Anyone not connected carries on exactly as before.

Plans

Priced on how busy you are, not how much you say

Included with Pro at 200 connections and with Unlimited at 2,500; these tiers are for communities that outgrow what their plan includes. A plan is a ceiling on how many members are connected at the same moment — pooled across every domain you register, staging sites included.

Starter

A community where a few hundred people are around at once.

$9 / month
  • 500 members connected at once
  • Up to 10 domains, staging included
  • Unlimited messages — no per-event charge
  • Falls back to polling, never to an error
Most popular

Growth

An active community with busy chat and a moving feed.

$29 / month
  • 2,500 members connected at once
  • Up to 25 domains, staging included
  • Unlimited messages — no per-event charge
  • Falls back to polling, never to an error

Scale

Several large communities, or one that never really sleeps.

$79 / month
  • 10,000 members connected at once
  • Up to 100 domains, staging included
  • Unlimited messages — no per-event charge
  • Falls back to polling, never to an error

Prices in USD, billed monthly, cancel any time. Account holders can subscribe from the Realtime page in the dashboard, so create a free account and connect your site first.

Questions

Realtime FAQ

Every paid Memberside plan already includes it — 200 members connected at once on Pro, 2,500 on Unlimited — so there is nothing to buy unless you outgrow that. Your app also works without it entirely, falling back to checking on a timer. It earns a bigger tier when your community actually talks to each other: busy chat, an active feed, a lot of people online at once. A quiet site will not notice the difference.

No, and they cannot. We carry a signal that says "something changed in this conversation" — an identifier and a timestamp, nothing else. The message itself is fetched from your own site by the app, over your own API, using your own permission rules. We never store, buffer or see a single word of it.

Apps fall back to checking on a timer, which is exactly what they do today without the add-on. Members see slightly slower updates and no error. The same is true if you cancel, or if more members are online than your plan connects — the extra members simply check on a timer until a connection frees up. Nothing breaks.

Yes. The notification bell and Ultimate Member messaging go live on your website as well, so this is worth having even if you have not published an app.

They are alternatives, and ours needs no licence from them. The difference is scope: theirs makes Better Messages chat live, ours covers notifications, both chat plugins, feeds, comments and group discussions through one connection — and it never carries your members’ content.

One member with your app or site open. Your plan is a ceiling on how many are connected at the same moment, not a monthly total, and it is pooled across every domain on your account — production, staging and a second community all draw from one allowance.

No. A live connection reaches someone who has your app open; reaching a phone that is asleep in a pocket needs push, which is a separate piece of work. Realtime makes the app feel instant while it is being used.

Watch a message land instantly

Create an account, connect your site, and see your own chat and notifications go live — without adding a single request to your server.
Start freeTry the live demo