Webflow incident runbook

Webflow Incident Runbook

Overview

Rapid incident response procedures for Webflow Data API v2 integration failures. Covers triage, immediate remediation by error type, graceful degradation, stakeholder communication, and postmortem.

Prerequisites

• Access to Webflow dashboard and status page
• Application logs and metrics access
• Communication channels (Slack, PagerDuty)
• Cached fallback data available

Severity Levels

Level	Definition	Response Time	Example
P1	Integration fully down	< 15 min	All API calls returning 401/500
P2	Degraded service	< 1 hour	High 429 rate, elevated latency
P3	Minor impact	< 4 hours	Webhook delays, form sync lag
P4	No user impact	Next business day	Monitoring gap, stale cache

Quick Triage (Run First)

#!/bin/bash
echo "=== Webflow Incident Triage ==="
echo "Time: $(date -u)"

# 1. Webflow platform status
echo ""
echo "--- Platform Status ---"
curl -s https://status.webflow.com/api/v2/status.json 2>/dev/null | \
  python3 -c "
import sys,json
d=json.load(sys.stdin)
print(f'Status: {d[\"status\"][\"description\"]}')
for c in d.get('components',[]):
  if c['status'] != 'operational':
    print(f'  DEGRADED: {c[\"name\"]} ({c[\"status\"]})')
" 2>/dev/null || echo "Cannot reach status page"

# 2. API connectivity
echo ""
echo "--- API Connectivity ---"
HTTP=$(curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $WEBFLOW_API_TOKEN" \
  https://api.webflow.com/v2/sites 2>/dev/null)
echo "Sites endpoint: HTTP $HTTP"

# 3. Rate limit status
echo ""
echo "--- Rate Limits ---"
curl -sI -H "Authorization: Bearer $WEBFLOW_API_TOKEN" \
  https://api.webflow.com/v2/sites 2>/dev/null | \
  grep -i "x-ratelimit\|retry-after" || echo "No rate limit headers"

# 4. Our health endpoint
echo ""
echo "--- App Health ---"
HEALTH=$(curl -s https://your-app.com/api/health 2>/dev/null)
echo "$HEALTH" | python3 -c "
import sys,json
d=json.load(sys.stdin)
print(f'Status: {d[\"status\"]}')
for k,v in d.get('services',{}).items():
  print(f'  {k}: {v.get(\"status\",\"unknown\")} ({v.get(\"latencyMs\",\"?\")}ms)')
" 2>/dev/null || echo "Health endpoint unreachable"

Decision Tree

Is Webflow API returning errors?
├── YES
│   ├── status.webflow.com shows incident?
│   │   ├── YES → Activate fallback. Wait for Webflow resolution.
│   │   └── NO → Our issue. Check token, config, network.
│   ├── HTTP 401/403?
│   │   └── Token issue. See "Auth Failure" below.
│   ├── HTTP 429?
│   │   └── Rate limited. See "Rate Limit" below.
│   └── HTTP 500/502/503?
│       └── Webflow server issue. Activate circuit breaker.
└── NO
    ├── Our service healthy?
    │   ├── YES → Likely resolved or intermittent. Monitor closely.
    │   └── NO → Our infrastructure issue (pods, memory, network).
    └── Webhooks not firing?
        └── Check webhook registrations and endpoint accessibility.

Immediate Actions by Error Type

401/403 — Authentication Failure (P1)

# Verify token is set
echo "Token present: ${WEBFLOW_API_TOKEN:+YES}${WEBFLOW_API_TOKEN:-NO}"

# Test token
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "HTTP %{http_code}" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $WEBFLOW_API_TOKEN" \
  https://api.webflow.com/v2/sites

# If 401: Token was revoked or expired
# Action: Generate new token at developers.webflow.com
# Then update in deployment platform:
# vercel env rm WEBFLOW_API_TOKEN production && vercel env add WEBFLOW_API_TOKEN production
# fly secrets set WEBFLOW_API_TOKEN=new-token
# kubectl create secret generic webflow-secrets --from-literal=api-token=NEW_TOKEN --dry-run=client -o yaml | kubectl apply -f -

# Restart application to pick up new token

429 — Rate Limited (P2)

# Check Retry-After header
curl -sI -H "Authorization: Bearer $WEBFLOW_API_TOKEN" \
  https://api.webflow.com/v2/sites 2>&1 | grep -i "retry-after"

# Immediate: Enable request queuing
# If feature flag available:
# curl -X POST https://your-app.com/admin/feature-flags \
#   -d '{"webflow_queue_mode": true}'

# Long-term fixes:
# 1. Switch reads to CDN-cached live endpoints (no rate limit)
# 2. Use bulk endpoints (100 items = 1 API call)
# 3. Reduce polling frequency
# 4. Contact Webflow for limit increase (enterprise)

500/502/503 — Webflow Server Error (P2)

# Confirm Webflow is the source
curl -s https://status.webflow.com/api/v2/status.json | jq '.status.description'

# Activate cached fallback
# Your circuit breaker should handle this automatically.
# If not, manually enable:
# curl -X POST https://your-app.com/admin/feature-flags \
#   -d '{"webflow_fallback_mode": true}'

# Monitor for recovery
watch -n 30 'curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $WEBFLOW_API_TOKEN" \
  https://api.webflow.com/v2/sites'

Webhook Delivery Failure (P3)

# Check webhook registrations
curl -s "https://api.webflow.com/v2/sites/$WEBFLOW_SITE_ID/webhooks" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $WEBFLOW_API_TOKEN" | \
  jq '.webhooks[] | {id, triggerType, url, createdOn}'

# Verify endpoint is accessible
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" https://your-app.com/webhooks/webflow

# Re-register if webhook was deleted
curl -X POST "https://api.webflow.com/v2/sites/$WEBFLOW_SITE_ID/webhooks" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $WEBFLOW_API_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"triggerType": "form_submission", "url": "https://your-app.com/webhooks/webflow"}'

Communication Templates

Internal (Slack)

P[1-4] INCIDENT: Webflow Integration
Status: INVESTIGATING | IDENTIFIED | MONITORING | RESOLVED
Impact: [What users experience]
Root cause: [Webflow outage / Token expired / Rate limited / Our bug]
Current action: [What we're doing]
Next update in: [15 min / 1 hour]
Incident commander: @[name]

External (Status Page)

Webflow Integration — Degraded Performance

We're experiencing issues with content updates powered by our Webflow integration.
[Specific impact: delayed content / forms not processing / orders not syncing].

Our team is actively working on resolution. Existing content remains accessible.

Last updated: [timestamp UTC]

Post-Incident

Evidence Collection

# Export recent logs
grep -i "webflow\|429\|401\|500" /var/log/app/*.log | tail -200 > incident-logs.txt

# Export metrics snapshot
curl "http://prometheus:9090/api/v1/query_range?\
query=rate(webflow_api_errors_total[5m])&\
start=$(date -d '2 hours ago' +%s)&\
end=$(date +%s)&step=60" > incident-metrics.json

# Generate debug bundle
./webflow-debug-bundle.sh

Postmortem Template

## Incident: Webflow [Error Description]
**Date:** YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM — HH:MM UTC
**Duration:** X hours Y minutes
**Severity:** P[1-4]
**Impact:** [Users affected, revenue impact]

### Timeline
- HH:MM — Alert fired: [description]
- HH:MM — Triage started
- HH:MM — Root cause identified: [cause]
- HH:MM — Mitigation applied: [action]
- HH:MM — Service restored

### Root Cause
[Technical explanation]

### What Went Well
- [What worked]

### What Went Wrong
- [What failed]

### Action Items
- [ ] [Preventive measure] — Owner — Due date
- [ ] [Monitoring improvement] — Owner — Due date

Output

• Triage script identifying the error source
• Decision tree for rapid root cause identification
• Remediation steps for every HTTP error type
• Communication templates for internal and external stakeholders
• Evidence collection for postmortem

Error Handling

Issue	Cause	Solution
Status page unreachable	Network issue or DNS	Use mobile data or VPN
Can't rotate token	Lost dashboard access	Contact Webflow support
Circuit breaker stuck open	Reset time too long	Manually reset or adjust threshold
Stale cache served	Fallback active too long	Set TTL on cached content

Resources

• Webflow Status Page
• Webflow Support
• API Reference

Next Steps

For data handling and compliance, see webflow-data-handling.