Realtime
Without Realtime, your app finds out about a new message when the member asks it to. With Realtime, the server tells the app something changed and the app fetches it.
What it changes
Section titled “What it changes”The screens where waiting is most obvious:
- Chat — a message arrives while the thread is open, instead of on the next refresh.
- News feed and activity — new posts appear without a pull.
- Notifications — the unread badge updates as it happens.
How it works
Section titled “How it works”The service carries signals, not content. When something changes, your app receives a short message saying so, and then fetches the actual data from your WordPress site over the normal API.
That is a deliberate design rather than an implementation detail:
- Your content never passes through the realtime service, so it holds no copy of your members’ messages.
- Permissions are enforced by your site, on the fetch, exactly as they are everywhere else. A signal cannot leak something the member could not already read.
- A dropped connection costs freshness, never correctness. The app falls back to refreshing as it would without the service.
Setting it up
Section titled “Setting it up”- Choose a plan at Realtime in the builder.
- Authorise your site — see Authorising a site.
- Enable the Realtime endpoint group under Memberside → REST API.
Step three is easy to miss. Realtime is an endpoint group like any other, and it is off until you switch it on.
Reconnection
Section titled “Reconnection”Clients reconnect with jitter — a small random delay before retrying — so that a brief service interruption does not produce every app in your community reconnecting at the same instant. Nothing to configure; worth knowing if you are watching your own server logs after an outage.
What it does not do
Section titled “What it does not do”It does not make your site faster. Every screen still reads from your WordPress install at the same speed. Realtime changes when the app knows to read, not how long reading takes.
If your problem is that screens are slow rather than stale, look at Site Health instead.
When it does not work
Section titled “When it does not work”| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Messages still only arrive on refresh | The Realtime endpoint group is off | Enable it under Memberside → REST API |
| Realtime works for some members only | Their app is an older build | Rebuild and redistribute |
| It stopped after a while | The connection dropped and is backing off | It reconnects on its own; the app still refreshes normally |
| The site will not authorise | The handshake was not completed | Authorising a site |