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FAQ

Below you will find answers to our most commonly asked questions about the Waiting Room.

Configuration

Can I display my waiting room page in another language?

Yes. For more details, refer to Customize a waiting room.

Why does my waiting room look different than how I designed it?

If you have customized your waiting room template:

  1. Preview your template before deploying it to production.
  2. If you encounter any issues, check for proper syntax and a closing backslash (/).

What can I update when my waiting room is actively queueing?

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.

Features and products

Which features are included in my Waiting Room plan?

To check which features are available to different plan types, refer to Plans.

How does Waiting Room interact with other Cloudflare products?

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

User behavior

What happens if a user refreshes their tab when in a waiting room?

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.

What happens if a queued user leaves the queue?

When a user joins the queue, they are placed into a bucket which is their general position in line. When a user leaves the queue (closes the browser or tab), their place in line is held for five minutes after the last refresh. This grace period allows users to keep their position in line if they experience a brief disconnection. After five minutes, the grace period expires and they are no longer counted as waiting in the queue.

Monitor your waiting room

Why do I observe a few users being queued in the dashboard?

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.

Why are some users not being queued in my waiting room?

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.

Why are users being blocked from entering my waiting room?

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.

Why is the estimated wait time increasing for some users?

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.

Why is new users per minute low when there is capacity available?

The new users per minute metric tracks how many users were accepted to the origin in the last minute. It is only incremented when a queued user refreshes and is accepted to the origin. If the waiting room queueing method is set to fifo, we will wait until all queued users in a minute-based bucket are accepted before moving to the next bucket. If many of the users in a bucket have abandoned the queue, then the waiting room must wait until their place in line expires before moving on to the next bucket. This can cause new users per minute to be low when only a small percentage of queued users are actually still waiting.

This is often noticed if there is a large amount of automated traffic which does not handle cookies properly. Since bots usually do not persist cookies from one request to the next, they end up counting as multiple inactive users in the queue and prevent full utilization of available slots. For this reason, we recommend leveraging Bots Management products to keep bots out of the queue. Waiting Room Advanced customers can try our Turnstile integration, which prevents bots from clogging the line by putting them in an infinite queue.