An affiliate site earns on the click-out rather than the page view. That redirect fires on every conversion and is usually the slowest thing on the site.
Content that caches perfectly, redirects that cannot be cached at all, and a price feed that rewrites the site every night.
Cloaked affiliate links are matched and redirected before WordPress boots, so the step between a reader deciding to buy and arriving at the merchant is a few milliseconds rather than a full page load.
Review and comparison pages change rarely and are read constantly, which is the ideal cache profile — they are answered from the nearest edge without touching the origin at all.
Merchant feeds updating thousands of prices run as scheduled platform jobs with their own limits, so a nightly refresh cannot time out and leave half your comparison tables quoting last month.
When a programme closes, its cloaked URLs redirect to a replacement rather than dropping readers on a dead merchant page, which protects both the reader and the ranking.
Large price tables are generated when the feed updates rather than assembled on each request, so a two-hundred-product comparison does not turn a cached page into a slow one.
The way an affiliate site loses money quietly is a dead programme: the page still ranks, the clicks still happen, and not one of them converts.
Everything else on the page is cached. The click-out is the one request that has to be computed, and it happens at the exact moment a reader is deciding whether to bother.
These are the settings that differ from a standard WordPress site on the same plan. Each follows from the money being made on a redirect rather than a page view.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Cloaked link redirects | Matched at the edge, before WordPress is loaded | Booting WordPress to answer a redirect adds a page load's worth of latency to the one request on the site that actually earns. |
| Redirect responses | Answered from an edge-held rule table rather than the page cache | A cached redirect keeps sending readers to a merchant you stopped working with, and a stale redirect is worse than a slow one. |
| Merchant feed import | Scheduled platform job with raised limits and partial-run alerts | A price refresh that dies halfway leaves comparison tables quoting prices that no longer exist, which is the fastest way to lose a reader's trust. |
| Content pages | Aggressively edge-cached with long lifetimes | Reviews change rarely and are read constantly, so anything short of a long cache lifetime throws away the easiest performance win on the site. |
| Retired programmes | Cloaked URLs remapped rather than left to return an error | Pages that still rank keep sending clicks long after a programme ends, and a dead link converts none of them. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Free migration, redirects answered at the edge, and price feeds that actually finish.