How To Fix Cloudflare Error 1015: You Are Being Rate Limited (Fast)
Jake Sacino 
February 8, 2021 February 8, 2021
The Cloudflare rate-limiting feature is designed to protect online services against different types of user attacks.
In certain situations, Cloudflare can block valid requests resulting in an error message that looks something like this:
What is Cloudflare Error 1015: You Are Being Rate Limited?
When a user comments that they’ve seen error 1015, Cloudflare is rate-limiting their connection. This means the rate-limited device is temporarily blocked from connecting for a short time. When this happens there’s no way for the visitor to access the domain until the error times out.
The 1015 error often causes users to bounce from a site entirely.
A smart website owner will act to resolve 1015 errors as quickly as possible to keep the traffic flowing.
(Don’t need the whole rundown about rate limiting? Click here to go straight to the solutions)
What is Rate Limiting?
Since lots of requests in a short period of time can overload a website, Cloudflare lets a site owner monitor and control your bandwidth consumption.
You can limit the impact of high-volume traffic by setting up a “rate-limiting” rule on a per-IP address or domain basis through the Cloudflare rate-limiting feature in your website owner settings.
With rate limiting, Cloudflare can automatically block traffic from a suspicious site visitor or IP address so that hackers, spammers, and other online pests are can’t bog down your site’s performance with DDoS attacks and other illicit activities.
How to Fix Cloudflare Error 1015: You Are Being Rate Limited
- Slow Down Your Activity
- Disable Rate Limiting
- Delete Your Old Rate Limiting Configuration
- Raise Your Rate Limiting Request Threshold
- Check the Time Restrictions On Your Rate Limits
- Consider Increasing Your Bandwidth
- Optimize Your Website
- Reach Out to the Cloudflare Support Community
Cloudflare Error 1015: “You are being rate limited” results from one of a few possible causes.
Most frequently, when a legitimate site visitor is being blocked by the rate-limiting error 1015 it’s due to issues with the rate-limiting configuration that only the site owner can fix.
Even in cases where the user may be sending lots of legitimate requests quickly, your web server needs to be configured to handle increased visitor traffic loads.
Let’s explore the different root causes that result in the Cloudflare rate-limiting error and how to troubleshoot those issues.
BTW a quick note—there’s actually a cache purge error code labeled 1015 in Cloudflare that’s unrelated to the rate-limiting problem.
“Unable to purge” is a separate 1015 error code that has to with Cloudflare cache purge. If this sounds more like the information you need, check out Cloudflare’s cache purge tips here.
1. Slow Down Your Activity
Oftentimes, slowing down is all your user needs to do to solve the issue.
When you interact with a website, each action you take demands a portion of the website’s resources.
The site can slow down (or crash) if its traffic isn’t managed. Cloudflare rate-limiting identifies and mitigates excessive request rates to the domain to avoid these slowdowns.
Except in unusually rare cases, your server should be configured to handle regular visitor traffic & activity such that high volumes of requests don’t lock them out of your website or app.
Slowing down user behavior on your website is only a temporary stop-gap you can use while you take steps to improve your Cloudfare rate limiting configuration and firewall rules.
2. Disable Rate Limiting
While I can’t in good conscience advise disabling your Cloudfare rate-limiting altogether, taking this step will at the very least your visitor traffic to flow freely.
If your website is throwing a lot of Cloudflare 1015 errors and it’s halting your business, you can open up your website to all traffic from any allowed IP address by disabling the rate limit rules altogether.
Remember—this may potentially expose your website to slowdowns or crashes as a result of high-volume requests or DDoS attacks.
A good site owner will only apply this solution as a first step towards optimizing their Cloudflare rate limiting configuration.
3. Delete Your Old Rate Limiting Configuration
You might receive complaints that users are still getting a 1015 error on your website even after disabling rate limiting.
In rare cases, your rate limit rules can still work even though the rate-limiting feature is disabled for the domain.
To ensure your rate limiting is properly turned off you can re-enable the rate-limiting feature in your site owner settings, entirely delete all of your rate limiting rules, and then disable rate limiting again.
4. Raise Your Rate Limiting Request Threshold
A very low limit is one of the most common causes of Cloudflare error 1015.
The site owner settings allow us to limit the number of page requests from an IP address in a given time interval. In most cases, users assume that each pageview on the website is equal to one request.
However, this is false—an individual pageview might feed as many as 50 or more requests to your server in just a few seconds, especially if the visitor is using a reverse proxy or has recently performed a cache purge.
Limiting the value of request based on this misinterpretation is a frequent cause of the 1015 error.
If your website is rate limited by a low request threshold, try disabling this rate limit in your account settings or significantly increasing the limit.
5. Check the Time Restrictions On Your Rate Limits
Another common mistake is setting a rate-limiting rule to block an IP address for multiple requests inside of 10 seconds.
This may cause legitimate traffic to experience unnecessary lockouts when users should have full rights to access your site.
Cloudflare support experts recommend you should configure the rate-limiting rules on your account to 10 seconds or more.
This isn’t always a default setting, and issues commonly arise when a site owner accidentally miskeys a “1” instead of the correct 10 seconds for this configuration
Check that your Cloudflare rate limit times are sufficiently high enough to allow normal volume from everyone using your site at the same time, or else your users will see more Cloudflare 1015 errors.
6. Consider Increasing Your Bandwidth
These Cloudflare abuse protection measures do apply in certain situations depending on the volume of traffic and accessing your application.
As the site owner, if you expect to receive the 1015 error message on a regular basis in response to traffic or expect your application to incur this error, contact Cloudflare support to increase your limit.
7. Optimize Your Website
Cookies saved in your visitor’s browser help the visitor load content using fewer requests. But if the cookies and cache have been cleared out, the browser will have to reload all of the site information again.
A poorly-designed or poorly-optimized site is one of the reasons you might see more page errors being thrown at legitimate IP addresses.
Some issues your customers may report include:
- Regularly having to refresh articles and posts on your site
- Having to clear their cache & cookies each time they access a given URL
- Slow page loading times
Repeatedly having to refresh, reload, and revisit a section of site each time you access it causes a significant spike in request traffic to your servers.
If you’re getting any of these complaints, then you need to ensure each part of your site is loading properly and serving the visitor’s browser with appropriate cache & cookie information.
A properly optimized website will help reduce the request load allowing your community to use your site error-free.
8. Reach Out to the Cloudflare Support Community
If these tips don’t help you identify and resolve the causes of the 1015 error code on your domain servers, app, or program, the Cloudflare support team is always there to help.
Cloudflare offers several support articles and its community forum to help you solve problems with your configuration, and if you pay for a support contract they can help you via email or live phone support.
If you or your site owner uses Cloudflare’s service for free accounts you can still use the robust community forums.
Between the Cloudflare forums and the broader online community, you can find posts full of details about how to resolve various error messages.
Keep tabs on the community forums to keep up with the latest details about issues & errors you’ve seen on your Cloudflare server or site.
If you’re looking for (free) tips to optimize your site speed with Cloudflare and rank higher on Google , you can follow me on Twitter ���� @bitofseo.
Please DM me if you have any questions about this Cloudflare article (or have some feedback to make it better ��️).
About Jake Sacino
After working as an engineer and consultant for a bunch of big companies, Jake now works as a full-time SEO & software engineer.
How to fix Cloudflare error 1015?
Cloudflare is one of the most popular tools used to protect websites and ensure they stay online in case of a DDoS attack. This means implementing rules and managing traffic flow to your website so your backend server can handle.
However, just like everything tech, Cloudflare isn’t immune to random bugs and errors or even user mistakes. In this article, we’re looking at Cloudflare error 1015, its causes and what you can do to fix the problem.
What does Cloudflare Error 1015 mean?
CloudFlare’s error 1015 means that you’re being rate limited by the website you’re trying to access. Sometimes, frequent repetitive actions can trigger the error on a protected website and block you from accessing it for a set period.
However, the error can also indicate a broader issue with the site, like incorrect Cloudflare configurations or a general issue with Cloudflare itself.
How to fix Cloudflare error 1015?
Here are x solutions you can try out to fix error 1015.
Slow down user activity
The first step to resolving errors like this is to slow the users down. The error is caused by the user performing far too many actions in a short time. If you’re visiting a site and seeing this error, stop interacting with the site for some time, and you should be able to access it again.
Disable rate limiting
While disabling rate limiting isn’t recommended as it leaves you open to DDoS attacks and general slowdowns caused by heavy traffic, this will allow an IP (or user) trying to access your site to do so without any problems. It would help if you used this as a temporary method in case the error 1015 is hampering your website’s user experience.
Delete rate limiting configurations
If you’re still getting error 1015 even after disabling rate limiting, you will have to delete your old rate limiting configurations. In some cases, rate-limiting continues to work even after the setting has been disabled if the rate-limiting rules aren’t deleted.
Increase the rate-limiting threshold
A rather low rate-limiting limit can also trigger the error 1015 unnecessarily. If you’ve set the threshold too low, even regular actions on the site can trigger this error. The simplest way to counter this is to raise the threshold to a higher number allowing for greater tolerance for repetitive actions. Alternatively, you can also just disable the limit altogether.
Reduce the time restrictions
Another setting you can change to eliminate error 1015 is to reduce the time it takes for the server to block a suspicious user. After rate limiting is enabled, there’s a set amount of time before a user can access the site again. If you reduce this time restriction, the error will go away quicker for the end-user.
Optimise your website
Another reason a user might have too many requests coming in from your site is the lack of optimisation. Using cookies or similar technologies, you can reduce how much data a user has to pull from the site on each visit, reducing the number of requests and the possibility of a 1015 error.
Consider a bandwidth upgrade
If your website is growing at a fast rate, you can overwhelm the bandwidth limits set by Cloudflare on your particular protection plan. Getting a plan upgrade with a greater bandwidth can help you get around error 1015.
Contact Cloudflare support
If nothing else works, the best option is to contact Cloudflare support and have them fix the problem for you. Alternatively, you can ask a question on Cloudflare’s community forum to see if someone experienced the same problems as you before and the steps they took to fix them.
Cloudflare Error 1015 ( How To Fix It )
As a website owner or manager, you want to provide your users with a seamless experience when they visit your site. Unfortunately, errors can occur that prevent them from accessing your site or slow down their experience. One such error is Cloudflare Error 1015, which can block legitimate visitors from accessing your site and negatively impact your search engine rankings.
In this article, we’ll explore what Cloudflare Error 1015 is and its causes. We’ll then provide you with several practical solutions to fix the error and improve your website’s performance.
What is Cloudflare Error 1015?
Cloudflare is a security service that protects websites from cyber-attacks and data breaches. One of its features is rate limiting, which prevents repeated requests from reaching the website and slows down its operation. Error 1015 is a rate-limiting error that occurs when the website owner has implemented a rate limit for requests, and the user is violating that limit.
When users encounter this error, they may receive a pop-up message that informs them that the site owner has banned them from accessing the page. This can result in fewer visitors clicking on your pages, which can lead to financial losses for site owners.
How to Resolve Cloudflare Error 1015?
There are several ways to fix Cloudflare Error 1015 and improve your website’s user experience. Here are some practical solutions:
- Throttle requests: Make sure you are only sending a limited number of requests in a given time to avoid violating the rate limit.
- Disable rate limiting: If the frequent appearance of “error 1015” is hurting your business or search engine rankings, you have the option of turning off rate-limiting on your app or website. However, keep in mind that switching off rate-limiting could potentially damage your site too.
- Wipe current rate limiting settings: If you have disabled access bans, reinstated the request restrictions using your site owner Cloudflare account, and deleted all rate-limiting regulations. Then switch off rate-limiting again.
- Increase the number of requests the website can process: Set a higher request threshold so that all users can have a glitch-free experience. The Cloudflare owner account allows you to view your request threshold settings and modify them accordingly so that they can support heavier web traffic.
- Modify the time limit: Enable the site to block users who have interacted with a page several times within ten seconds. This extended period enables multiple users to view the site simultaneously without denying web access.
- Increase bandwidth support: Providing the pages with more resources will minimize access interruptions and provide optimal data transmission between the site and its users.
- Optimize the website design: Outdated website design can cause issues for visitors trying to enter the site. Pages with slow loading speeds force users to repeatedly refresh their browsers and wipe cache data whenever they click on the site’s URL.
- Seek community support: Cloudflare provides its users with a rich library of resources to resolve various errors. While the methods we mentioned are effective, you should keep an eye on Cloudflare’s Community section. Other website and app owners post their experiences and how they’ve strengthened their online presence. It’s an excellent place for finding solutions to issues you might face in the future.
Conclusion
Providing visitors with an error-free experience is crucial for your website’s success. By following the practical solutions we’ve provided, you can resolve Cloudflare Error 1015 and improve your website’s performance. Remember to prioritize website performance and user experience to ensure the success of your online business.
Cloudflare Error 1015: what is it and how to avoid it?
Cloudflare Error 1015 refers to the rate limiting error. It is thrown by Cloudflare when the website owner has implemented a rate limit for requests and you are violating that rate limit. This can happen when you are sending a ton of requests in a very short amount of time.
You can get around this error in two ways. One is to throttle your requests. Make sure you are only sending a limited number of requests in a given time. Another way to get around this error is to use a reliable premium proxy provider like ScrapingBee. ScrapingBee makes sure to rotate the proxies so no one proxy triggers the rate limiting. This should help you bypass the Cloudflare 1015 error.