http 429 errors

It’s been a while without a response from you so I am going to mark this as closed.

If anything else comes up down the road, don’t hesitate to open a new thread. We’re always here to help!

Hi there!

Thanks for your message. We don’t provide support via email, so we won’t be able to reopen the call or access the logs you sent there.

To help us investigate further, please share your WooCommerce system status report using https://quickforget.com/. You can set the report to auto-delete once we’ve reviewed the details, so no sensitive data is stored long-term.

Also, to better understand the impact, could you share the exact details of your hosting provider’s policy regarding rate-limiting? For example, we’re trying to determine if the 429s are only for bot/crawler traffic, or if they might also affect normal product feed requests. Knowing this will help us suggest the best way to ensure your Pinterest feed works correctly despite these limits.

Hi @mwanamajinl,

Thanks for sharing the system report and the additional details around your host’s rate limiting, I can see how the strict crawl limits would impact Pinterest’s ability to fetch your product images reliably.

From what you’ve shared, the key issue here is that your hosting provider enforces a very low request rate, roughly 1 request every 10 seconds, while Pinterest’s crawler is attempting to fetch images at a faster pace. Since this limit is enforced at the server level, it results in the HTTP 429 responses you’re seeing, and unfortunately this is outside of what the Pinterest for WooCommerce plugin can directly control.

Looking at your setup , everything appears generally in order from the WooCommerce side, so this does point back to the hosting restriction rather than a misconfiguration in your store.

Here are a few practical options you can consider to move forward:

1. Allowlist Pinterest crawlers
   If your host supports it, you could ask them to whitelist Pinterest’s crawler IPs or user agents so they are not subject to the strict rate limiting.
2. Use a CDN for images
   Serving your images through a CDN such as Cloudflare can help offload requests from your origin server, allowing Pinterest to fetch images without hitting your host’s limits.
3. Adjust bot protection settings
   Some hosts allow fine tuning of bot or crawler limits. If there is any flexibility to increase the rate for known crawlers, that would help significantly.
4. Reduce image fetch pressure
   While not always possible, ensuring images are optimized and consistently accessible can reduce retries from Pinterest’s side.

At the moment, there isn’t a way within the plugin to throttle or “spread out” Pinterest’s requests, since the crawling behavior is controlled entirely by Pinterest.

If you’re able to confirm whether your host can allowlist Pinterest or relax limits for trusted crawlers, that would be the most effective path forward here.

Let me know what your host says about allowlisting, and I’ll be happy to guide you further based on that.