Facebook Request Throttle

Facebook Request Throttle Rate-limit Facebook and Meta crawlers to protect your server from excessive scraping load. Facebook's web crawlers (facebookexternalhit and meta-externalagent) can hammer your server when a URL gets shared — especially on viral posts. This plugin throttles those requests to one per configured window and returns a proper 429 Too Many Requests with a Retry-After header so the crawler backs off gracefully. Requirements | Requirement | Minimum | Recommended | |---|---|---| | PHP | 7.4 (runtime) | 8.2 or 8.3 | | WordPress | 5.0 | 6.9 (latest) | | MySQL / MariaDB | 5.5.5 / 10.0 | 8.0 / 10.6 | CI runs the test suite on PHP 8.1, 8.2 and 8.3 (PHPUnit 10 requires PHP 8.1+; the plugin itself runs on PHP 7.4+). Features - Throttles facebookexternalhit and meta-externalagent user agents - Returns 429 Too Many Requests with a Retry-After header - Skips image requests (jpg, jpeg, png, gif, webp) — Open Graph images always served - Admin log under Settings → FB Throttle Log — last 100 hits with timestamp, status, IP, URI, and user agent - Dashboard-configurable throttle duration — no code edits needed - Backward compatible — define( 'FACEBOOKREQUESTTHROTTLE', 120