Webhook Best Practices: Retry Logic, Idempotency, and Error Handling

Webhook Best Practices: Retry Logic, Idempotency, and Error Handling Most webhook integrations fail silently. A handler returns 500, the provider retries a few times, then stops. Your system never processed the event and no one knows. Webhooks are not guaranteed delivery by default. How reliably your integration works depends almost entirely on how you write the receiver. This guide covers the patterns that make webhook handlers production-grade: proper retry handling, idempotency, error response codes, and queue-based processing. Understand the Delivery Model Before building handlers, understand what you are dealing with: Providers send webhook events as HTTP POST requests They expect a 2xx response within a timeout (typically 5-30 seconds) If they do not receive 2xx, they retry on a schedule (often exponential backoff over hours or days) Most providers have a maximum retry count after which the event is dropped Some providers allow you to manually retry from their dashboard Stripe re