Add-on services overview
Three services sit alongside the builder. None is required, none changes what your app can do, and each is bought separately from your builder plan.
They exist for a single problem: a WordPress site that is slow enough to make a fast app feel slow.
| Service | Fixes |
|---|---|
| Media CDN | Avatars and photos loading slowly, from your own origin |
| Realtime | Chat and feeds that only update when a member pulls to refresh |
| Memberside Optimizer | A member directory that has become slow on a large site |
Whether you need any of them
Section titled “Whether you need any of them”Start by looking at Site Health. If your latency is comfortably under 300ms across every endpoint group, none of these will make a difference your members can feel, and the money is better spent elsewhere.
Reach for them when a specific number is bad:
- Images slow, everything else fine — Media CDN.
- The directory slow, everything else fine — Optimizer.
- Everything fine, but chat feels dead between refreshes — Realtime.
- Everything slow — none of these. The site itself is the problem, and hosting or a heavy plugin is where to look first.
How they are billed
Section titled “How they are billed”Each has its own Starter, Growth and Scale levels, priced separately from the builder tiers.
They are separate subscriptions. Cancelling one does not affect the others or your builder plan, and a builder plan does not include any of them.
Connecting a site
Section titled “Connecting a site”Media CDN and Realtime each need your WordPress site to authorise them. That is a different handshake from the builder’s application-password connection — it is an approve-and-exchange flow that issues a token scoped to that service.
See Authorising a site.
What they do not do
Section titled “What they do not do”They do not host your site. Your WordPress install stays where it is.
They do not cache your content. A post is still read live from your site. Media CDN serves images; it does not put your posts behind a cache that could go stale.
They are not required for any feature. Every screen in the catalogue works without them.