How to Avoid 429 Error Codes with Prerender

Prerender will return a 429 error code to the bots if the Prerender crawlers get a 429 error or if the Free Prerender plan's rendering limit is reached.

Free Prerender plan limit reached

If you're using the Free plan and encounter the 429 status code in your search console, it's likely you have exceeded your Prerender usage limit.
To check this, navigate to the Billing menu on your dashboard. With the free Prerender plan, the service will send back a 429 code to bots that request a page that hasn't been cached yet.

Once you have exceeded the free limit, we recommend subscribing to one of our paid plans, as they offer more renderings per billing period.
Furthermore with our paid plans, if you reach the usage limit, the system will not return 429 error codes to the search bots.
Instead, it will continue rendering the uncached pages and charge you extra fees based on your Prerender subscription plan.
This approach ensures uninterrupted service and helps you avoid any potential negative impact on your website's SEO.

Prerender crawler gets a 429 status

If the corresponding Prerender account has one of our paid plans, such as Start Up (discontinued), Scale Up (discontinued), Essential, Advanced or Enterprise then the Prerender service won't return a 429 status to the bots if your usage limit is reached. However, if our crawler gets a 429 code when it tries to render an uncached page when a bot requests it, then Prerender will return the same code to the bots.

The 429 status usually means that the request was blocked due to rate limiting so the source of the code is likely your firewall or proxy.
You might get the same status if your server is under DDOS/DOS at the time of the request or if there are too many pages requested by Prerender which is detected as such.

Too many Prerender requests

Prerender has to recache all the pages in your cache within the time you set up as your cache expires. So if the cache expiration is set too low compared to the number of URLs in your cache The service might request so many URLs from your server that your DDOS detection is triggered and Prerender gets rate limited.
In this case, you can either increase the Cache expiration in your Prerender dashboard or you can whitelist our IP addresses. 

To keep your SEO reactivity we suggest using our /recache API endpoint to recache pages that changed before the cached version expires.
API docs can be found here.

Related articles: 

- Status Codes

- Has your Rendering paused?