About the data refresh interval
By default, PetPress refreshes its data every 30 minutes. That means that if you make a change in your shelter management software, it will take up to 30 minutes to see the change on your website. You may, in fact, see the changes sooner, but at maximum the delay should be 30 minutes.
Premium plan users have the option to shorten this refresh interval to as short as 5 minutes. This begs the question “is there ever a scenario in which I would want something other than the shortest interval available?”
The answer is: usually you will be most satisfied with the shortest interval, but there are some exceptions that you should be aware of. First is that there is a limit to the number of requests you are allowed to make of your kennel management system in a set period of time. Some systems actually spell out what those limits are, others will just shut you off (temporarily) when you’ve exceeded the limit. Generally, the error you will get is a “429” error (“too many requests”), and that is your signal that you need to throttle back to a longer refresh interval.
There are two scenarios, specifically, that would have increased risk of exceeding your request limit:
-
- You have a large number of animals in your data. All animals are part of this calculation, not just the number of animals in the species shown on a given page.
- You have multiple websites all calling for data from the same account. This may happen if you have one or more staging servers in use. It’s recommended that staging or test servers stay at the 30 minute refresh interval.
(Note that the amount of web traffic to your site is not part of the equation, since the requests for data from the datasource is independent of the number of pages served)