A report sitting in the uploads directory is one guessed URL away from being ungated, and search engines are extremely good at guessing.
You are trading a file for a contact record. Both halves of that exchange need looking after.
Files are served through signed links that expire, rather than living at a path anybody can request. A PDF in the uploads directory gets indexed, and then the gate is decorative.
The form is the only thing on the page that earns, and it is also the only part a cache cannot help with, so it is excluded and given room.
A fifty-megabyte report pulled through PHP occupies a worker for the entire transfer. Files are edge-served with range support instead.
Ad clicks arrive carrying tracking parameters. Those are stripped before the cache key is computed, so a thousand ads share one cached landing page rather than creating a thousand cold ones.
The database behind a gated library is named people at named companies. It is encrypted at rest and never cached.
The quiet failure here is an asset that was gated when it launched and became public the day somebody uploaded a second copy to the media library.
Most of this traffic is paid, arrives once, and decides in a second. The page has to be cached and the form behind it has to work under campaign load.
These differ from a standard WordPress site on the same plan, and each follows from a file being exchanged for a contact record.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Gated assets | Served through signed, expiring URLs rather than a public path | A PDF sitting in the uploads directory is one guessed URL from being ungated, and it will be found and indexed. |
| Form endpoints | Excluded from cache with dedicated write capacity | Lead capture is the only thing on these pages that earns, and it is the only part a cache is no help with. |
| Download delivery | Edge-served with byte-range support, off the PHP workers | A large report downloaded through PHP holds a worker for the whole transfer, and these files are large by design. |
| Cache key | Tracking parameters stripped before the key is computed | Campaign traffic arrives with query strings, so keying on them gives every ad its own cold copy of the same page. |
| Lead data | Encrypted at rest and excluded from cache entirely | A gated library's database is a list of named prospects at named companies, which is a different class of record from post content. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Free migration, assets behind signed links, and campaign pages that still serve from cache.