{{HTTPSidebar}}
The Retry-After
response HTTP header indicates how long the user agent should wait before making a follow-up request. There are two main cases this header is used:
- When sent with a {{HTTPStatus(503)}} (Service Unavailable) response, it indicates how long the service is expected to be unavailable.
- When sent with a redirect response, such as {{HTTPStatus(301)}} (Moved Permanently), it indicates the minimum time that the user agent is asked to wait before issuing the redirected request.
Header type | {{Glossary("Response header")}} |
---|---|
{{Glossary("Forbidden header name")}} | no |
Syntax
Retry-After: <http-date> Retry-After: <delay-seconds>
Directives
- <http-date>
- A date after which to retry. See the {{HTTPHeader("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 sent it along with a {{HTTPStatus(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", "Retry-After", "7.1.3")}} | 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/README.md and send us a pull request.
{{Compat}}
See also
- {{HTTPStatus(503)}} (Service Unavailable)
- {{HTTPStatus(301)}} (Moved Permanently)