Webhook Best Practices

Webhooks are a crucial tool for real-time communication between services. Despite their apparent simplicity, webhooks present complex challenges such as unreliable user endpoints, system reliability, and unique security implications like spoofing, server side request forgery and replay attacks.

Here are some of the best practices we've developed through our experience building a secure, reliable, and scalable webhook service for our customers:

📄️ Webhook Authentication Best Practices

What is Webhook Authentication?

📄️ Best Practices for Sending Webhooks

A reliable webhook system is now a baseline expectation for API providers.

📄️ Best Practices for Receiving Webhooks

At Svix we often focus on sending webhooks, but receiving them well matters just as much.

📄️ Webhook Retry Best Practices

How to retry failed webhook deliveries without causing duplicates or overwhelming a recovering server, covering exponential backoff, jitter, dead letter queues, and a concrete retry schedule.

📄️ Webhook Security Best Practices

Webhooks are a potent tool, but there are specific attack vectors that they are particularly vulnerable to.