The Retry-After
response HTTP header indicates how long the user agent should wait before making a follow-up request. There are three main cases this header is used:
- When sent with a
503
(Service Unavailable) response, this indicates how long the service is expected to be unavailable. - When sent with a
429
(Too Many Requests) response, this indicates how long to wait before making a new request. - When sent with a redirect response, such as
301
(Moved Permanently), this indicates the minimum time that the user agent is asked to wait before issuing the redirected request.
Header type | Response header |
---|---|
Forbidden header name | no |
Syntax
Retry-After: <http-date> Retry-After: <delay-seconds>
Directives
- <http-date>
- A date after which to retry. See the
Date
header for more details on the HTTP date format. - <delay-seconds>
- A non-negative decimal integer indicating the seconds to delay after the response is received.
Examples
Dealing with scheduled downtime
Support for the Retry-After
header on both clients and servers is still inconsistent. However, some crawlers and spiders, like the Googlebot, honor the Retry-After
header. It is useful to send it along with a 503
(Service Unavailable) response, so that search engines will keep indexing your site when the downtime is over.
Retry-After: Wed, 21 Oct 2015 07:28:00 GMT Retry-After: 120
Specifications
Specification | Title |
---|---|
RFC 7231, section 7.1.3: Retry-After | Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Semantics and Content |
Browser compatibility
The compatibility table in this page is generated from structured data. If you'd like to contribute to the data, please check out https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data and send us a pull request.
Desktop | Mobile | |||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Retry-After | Chrome ? | Edge Full support ≤18 | Firefox
No support
No
| IE ? | Opera ? | Safari ? | WebView Android ? | Chrome Android ? | Firefox Android
No support
No
| Opera Android ? | Safari iOS ? | Samsung Internet Android ? |
Legend
- Full support
- Full support
- No support
- No support
- Compatibility unknown
- Compatibility unknown
- See implementation notes.
- See implementation notes.
See also
- Google Webmaster blog: How to deal with planned site downtime
503
(Service Unavailable)301
(Moved Permanently)