Building a Production Affiliate Platform — Lessons Learned

## The Problem With Most Affiliate Sites Most affiliate sites are WordPress with a plugin. They're slow, generic, and hard to customize. I wanted to build one that loads in under 1 second, ranks on Google, and is fully controlled through a custom admin panel. ## Architecture Decisions ### Database Schema The key insight was separating "products" from "deals." A product has a permanent URL; a deal is time-sensitive. This separation lets you have evergreen SEO pages for products while still running flash deals. ### Caching Strategy Affiliate links change prices frequently. I implemented a 30-minute cache on product prices using PostgreSQL's updated_at timestamps. Fresh enough for accuracy, cached enough for speed. ### SEO for Affiliate Sites The biggest SEO win was generating static product pages at build time (SSG). Each product has its own URL, its own meta tags, and its own structured data. Google loves this. ## What I'd Do Differently 1. Use Redis for caching instead of in-memory 2. Add a price history chart — users love seeing price drops 3. Build email alerts for price drops earlier in the project ## Results The platform supports 5,000+ products, filters by 12 categories, and loads in ~800ms on a cold start.