Live Mode is built but is not switched on in the current version of the plugin, so it cannot be enabled on a site today. This page describes the trade-offs it will carry when it ships.
Live Mode trades storage for freshness, and a few features depend on storage. This page lists every one of them, so you can decide before you switch rather than discover them afterwards.
None of these are faults to be fixed by configuration. They follow from reading listings on demand instead of holding them.
Search engines
This is the trade that matters most, and the one to weigh first.
Live listing pages are generated at the moment they are requested. There is no post behind them, so they are not in your WordPress sitemap, and a crawler has no list of them to work from. A page that vanishes when the listing leaves the MLS is not the kind of address a search engine rewards.
Your own pages are unaffected. The home page, the search pages, your area pages and your blog are ordinary WordPress content and rank as they always did. What you lose is a durable page per property.
If organic traffic to individual listings is part of your plan, import instead. This is the one limitation that cannot be worked around, and it is the reason most agencies with an established site stay on stored mode.
Search
- The keyword box is hidden. MLS APIs have no full text search, so a keyword field would look like it worked while doing nothing. Rather than mislead, it is removed from the form.
- Draw on the map is unavailable. The half map‘s drawing tools are hidden, because matching a hand drawn shape against listings needs the local table Live Mode does not build.
- Very long selections can fail. Ticking a great many values in one filter builds a query the MLS may reject for length. Split a wide selection across two searches.
Everything else in the search form works normally, and the dropdowns are actually better. They are filled from your MLS’s own list of accepted values, so a dropdown can only offer something the search will honour.
The map
Zoomed in, the map shows real pins with full cards, read live like everything else.
Zoomed out over a large area there are too many listings to plot, so the map shows counted bubbles instead. Those counts come from an index MLSImport refreshes daily, they cover your whole active market, and they do not respond to search filters. A map with filters applied shows a zoom in notice rather than counts that would be wrong.
Speed
The first view of any page costs a round trip to your MLS, and views within the cache lifetime are served instantly from the cache. In practice that means popular pages are fast and an unusual filter combination takes a moment.
The comparison worth making is against your hosting, not against a perfect site. A stored site on hosting that cannot finish an import is slower in every way that counts.
Photos
Images are served from your MLS’s own servers rather than copied into your media library. Nothing occupies your disk, and there are no locally generated thumbnails.
Confirm your MLS agreement permits displaying images from their servers this way. Most do, and the rule is worth reading rather than assuming.
Things that need stored listings
- Editing a listing. There is no post to edit, so descriptions, photos and titles are exactly as the MLS sends them.
- Amenity and feature filtering on the property page. Features are taxonomy terms, and terms need stored listings.
- Agent profile pages. Agent profiles are stored content and continue to work, but they are not built from live data. Listing grids can still filter by the listing agent.
- Category images and term pages. These describe local terms, which Live Mode does not create.
Saved properties keep working. The heart stores the MLS listing key rather than a post ID, which is exactly why a visitor’s shortlist survives in a mode with no posts at all.
Your MLS’s rate limits
Every uncached view is a query against your MLS quota, and the quota is set by your data agreement rather than by us. The cache is what keeps the volume reasonable, and raising the cache lifetime is the lever if you are asked to reduce your call volume.
Provider differences
Providers cap how many listings they return in one response, and the caps vary. Some allow a couple of hundred, some allow twenty five. The plugin respects each provider’s cap, which means the number of listings on one page of results is bounded by your MLS rather than by your settings.
Paragon and ConnectMLS are not supported in Live Mode at all.
Frequently asked questions
Can I turn Live Mode on temporarily and import later?
Yes. The two modes do not interfere. Switching off resumes importing on the next scheduled run.
Will Google penalise a site with no listing pages?
No. There is nothing wrong with the site, it has fewer pages to rank. Your own content pages are judged as usual.
Is the keyword search coming back?
Not while the data is live. It needs an index of listing text, which is what stored mode builds and Live Mode deliberately avoids.
What happens when my MLS is down?
The last cached answer keeps being served for up to a day, so most outages pass unseen. Beyond that, grids render empty rather than showing an error.
Related
- What Live Mode is and when to use it
- Enabling Live Mode and its cache settings
- How MLS websites work: import against live IDX
- Favourites and saved properties
Tell us which of these matters to your business and we will say whether Live Mode still fits.