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Where are my messages stored?

Better Messages stores every message body in your own WordPress database — the WebSocket cloud relay does not persist message content of any kind.

The WebSocket servers act as relays only: they pass messages between participants in real time and store the minimum metadata needed to deliver them. They also cannot read what they pass on. Message text, subjects, sender names and avatars reach the relay encrypted by your WordPress server, each conversation with its own key that only its members' browsers get, so the relay only ever holds ciphertext it has no key for. End-to-end encryption goes one step further and keeps a conversation unreadable to your own server and database as well.

What the WebSocket servers DO store#

  • User IDs
  • Thread IDs
  • Message IDs
  • Unread message count per thread
  • Delivery status per message
  • Licensed website domains (e.g. your-site.com)

What the WebSocket servers DO NOT store#

Anything else. No message bodies, no file content, and no user profile data.

What the relay sees in transit#

Only what it needs to route a message: the user, thread and message ids. Two things sit next to message content and are worth knowing for a privacy review:

  • Web push notifications. The relay delivers them, so it sees their text, which by default only names the sender ("New message from Anna"). Notifications for the mobile apps are encrypted for each device before they leave your server.
  • Better Messages Cloud AI. Translation, AI moderation and voice transcription are a separate service that you switch on. The text they work on is sent to Better Messages Cloud for processing and discarded right after, never stored.

For sites with strict data-sovereignty requirements (GDPR Article 9, HIPAA-adjacent, jurisdictional rules), consider the Self-Hosted plan — the relay runs on infrastructure you control.

See also#