Realtime channels

Sites can push live updates to visitors' browsers over WebSockets — no polling, no separate realtime service. This powers anything that should update the moment something changes.

What you can build

• Live chat between visitors and staff, or between users
• Notifications that appear instantly
• Presence — showing who's online or active
• Live dashboards — figures that update as data arrives
• Collaborative and multiplayer interactions

How it works

A site exposes named channels that browsers subscribe to. Your server-side logic broadcasts JSON messages to a channel and every connected subscriber receives them immediately. You can broadcast in response to a database change or on demand from a handler or scheduled task.

Channels support connection lifecycle hooks — connect, message, disconnect — so you can track per-connection state, and you can require authentication so only permitted visitors join a channel.

On the page

A small client-side runtime in the browser handles subscribing to channels and receiving messages, so wiring up the front end is straightforward. Combine it with sessions and auth to scope channels to the right users.

Availability

Realtime is part of the higher plan tiers; agency-owned sites include it. See Capabilities overview.