API requests limit

Requests made to the Delivery API and Delivery Preview API count towards the overall API Calls limit set in the Fair Use Policy or your subscription plan. This includes requests for both published and unpublished content. There is no limit on the total number of API calls you can make.

Change processing time

The Delivery API processes changes to your content items in sequential order, one after another. In high-volume scenarios, this can lead to delays between making a change and seeing the results of that change in the API. See the following example scenarios for details. Example A: Editing and publishing content items If you publish a content item, the API processes this change in a few seconds. When publishing larger amounts of content, there can be a delay in the availability of that content in the API. For example, if you publish 100 content items, the first item will be available a few minutes sooner than the last one. Example B: Editing content types When you change a content type, the API needs to process all content items based on that type. If your changes affect hundreds or thousands of content items, the API recalculates the content of each item. While this is happening, any new changes to content items need to wait before being processed by the API. For example, imagine you have an Article content type with 100,000 content items based on that type. If you add an element to the content type, the API processes the items and begins updating their content. Given the high number of items, this process can take up to a few hours. Until the API finishes processing the Article items, any subsequent content changes need to wait. If you publish a content item right after modifying the Article content type, the published item appears in the API only after the type change was fully processed. Example C: Changing localization settings We strongly recommend against changing language codenames in production environments with lots of content. This action might lead to temporary inconsistencies that might affect the content in your web app. If you change a language codename, the API needs to process all content items that have content in that language. Until the change is fully processed, the API might return some items with the old language codename and some items with the new language codename.

Rate limitation

Rate limits specify the number of requests you can make to the Delivery API within a specific time window. For cached requests served from our CDN, we don't enforce any rate limits. These are repeated requests for cached data. For uncached requests that reach the Delivery API, we enforce a rate limitation of 100 requests per second and 2000 requests per minute. These are unique requests for uncached data. When you reach the rate limit, the API rejects the request and responds with a 429 HTTP error. This error comes with the Retry-After header that tells you how many seconds you need to wait before retrying your request. Each failed request is perfectly safe to retry. If you begin to receive 429 errors, reduce the frequency of your requests.

Response size

When you request a single content item or list of items, the Delivery API limits the maximum number of items returned within a response to 2000 items. This number covers both the items that directly match the specified query and the linked items returned in the response's modular_content property. You can find whether your requests are close to the limit by looking at the X-Request-Charge header.