> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.engine.usesophic.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Best Practices

> Recommendations for building a reliable webhook integration

### Respond quickly

Return a `2xx` response as soon as you can. We recommend offloading any heavy processing to a background job or queue rather than doing it inline. If your handler takes too long to respond, we'll treat it as a failure and retry the delivery.

### Use HTTPS

Your webhook endpoint needs to use HTTPS. We won't deliver events to insecure HTTP URLs.

### Verify signatures

Always [verify](/docs/webhooks/verifying-signatures) the `Webhook-Signature` header and reject requests with invalid or stale timestamps. This helps protect your integration from forged or replayed requests.

### Handle retries gracefully

Your endpoint may receive the same event more than once, so it's important to make your handler [idempotent](/docs/webhooks/deliveries#handling-duplicates). Using the `Webhook-Id` header to deduplicate deliveries is a simple and effective approach.

### Monitor failures

We recommend setting up alerting for webhook delivery failures. If deliveries are consistently failing, you can use the [List events](/api-reference/events/get-events) endpoint to reconcile any missed events and replay them as needed.

### Check the attempt number

The `Webhook-Attempt` header tells you which retry attempt a delivery is on. Logging this value can help you spot issues with your endpoint; high retry rates often point to slow response times or intermittent errors.