FAQ
Below you will find answers to our most commonly asked questions about the Waiting Room.
Yes. For more details, refer to Customize a waiting room.
If you have customized your waiting room template:
- Preview your template before deploying it to production.
- If you encounter any issues, check for proper syntax and a closing backslash (/).
You can update a waiting room’s template and those changes will be visible to users in near-real time. We recommend these updates as a way to engage with users and provide updated information or expectations.
You can also update the configuration settings of a waiting room, but only make these changes when necessary. These changes may impact the estimated wait time shown to end users and cause unnecessary confusion.
To check which features are available to different plan types, refer to Plans.
Some Cloudflare products run before a waiting room acts on traffic:
- DDoS Mitigation
- Web Application Firewall (WAF)
- Bot Management
- Page Rules
Other Cloudflare products run after a waiting room acts on traffic:
- Workers
A manual tab refresh has no effect on a user’s position in your waiting room.
However, if they close their tab and then try to access the application again during active queueing, they will lose their spot and have to go to the back of the queue.
Some users might be queued before your waiting room reaches is limit due to architectural designs. For more details on the behavior and how to fix it, refer to Queueing activation.
If you notice users not being queued to your waiting room, make sure the path you defined exactly matches the path of your website.
The path is case-sensitive, so if you have a waiting room set up for /Black-Friday-Sale and users go to /black-friday-sale, they will bypass your waiting room.
For more details, refer to Best practices.
If you have Rate Limiting, check your rate limiting rules.
The Waiting Room queue page refreshes every 20 seconds by populating the refresh header. If you have a rule set to block requests from a specific IP within 20 seconds, the user in the waiting room will be blocked. Make sure your rules allow at least one request every 20 seconds.
Your user also might not have cookies enabled. If they do not enable cookies and your waiting room is actively queueing traffic, they will not reach your endpoint until the queueing stops.
Estimated wait times may increase if the rate of users leaving your site decreases. The estimated wait time is updated upon each page refresh based on the most recently available information about the rate of slots opening up on your site and the number of users ahead of the user in line. To make this increase less likely, you could limit the amount of time users are allowed to spend on your site by disabling session renewal. Be aware that if you change your traffic settings, estimated wait times will change as well.