Web scraping best practices: stay fast, polite and unblocked

Good scraping is reliable and respectful. A few practices keep your crawls fast, unblocked and producing clean data.

Be polite

Respect robots.txt, add a delay between requests, and limit concurrency per host. AutoThrottle adapts the rate to the site's response time.

Be resilient

Retry failed requests with backoff, rotate proxies and user agents, and use incremental crawling to skip pages that haven't changed.

Guard data quality

Declare expected field types, dedup across runs, and enable anomaly alerts so a sudden drop in item count tells you a selector broke — before bad data spreads.

Automate the boring parts

Schedule recurring crawls and get notified only when the data actually changes.