How to Avoid Getting Blocked When Web Scraping
To avoid getting blocked when web scraping, distribute requests across rotating residential proxies, send realistic browser headers, pace and randomise your requests, target the right location, and handle errors with backoff. Most blocks come from sending too many requests from one IP or looking obviously automated.
1. Rotate IPs with residential proxies
The single biggest factor is the IP. Use rotating residential proxies so each request (or small batch) comes from a different real home IP. This prevents the rate limits and bans that hit a single repeating address, and bypasses systems that block datacenter ranges.
2. Send realistic headers
- Set a real, current User-Agent and rotate it.
- Include Accept, Accept-Language and Referer headers.
- Match header order and values to a real browser.
3. Pace and randomise requests
Add delays between requests (1–5 seconds) and randomise them. Aggressive, perfectly-timed bursts are an obvious bot signal. Slowing down a little dramatically improves success rates.
4. Use sessions where needed
For multi-step flows (login, pagination, carts) use sticky sessions to keep the same IP, then rotate between sessions. For independent page fetches, rotate per request.
5. Target the right location
Use country or city targeting so the IP location matches the content you're collecting — this both improves accuracy and looks natural.
6. Handle errors gracefully
- 1Detect blocks and CAPTCHAs from status codes and page content.
- 2Retry with a fresh IP and exponential backoff.
- 3Cap retries and log problem domains.
Proxies remove the IP bottleneck; clean headers, pacing and good error handling do the rest. Always respect robots.txt and the site's terms.
Frequently asked questions
Why do I keep getting blocked when scraping?
Usually because too many requests come from one IP, you're using detectable datacenter IPs, or your requests look automated (missing/odd headers, no delays). Rotating residential proxies plus realistic headers and pacing fix most cases.
Do proxies stop CAPTCHAs?
Clean residential IPs greatly reduce CAPTCHA frequency because they look like real users. Combine them with good request hygiene; for the toughest sites you may still need a CAPTCHA-solving step.
How slow should my scraper be?
A common starting point is 1–5 seconds between requests with randomisation, adjusted to the site's tolerance. Rotating IPs lets you parallelise while keeping per-IP rates low.
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