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​​ Before you begin

Before you start this tutorial, make sure you have:

• Completed the prerequisites.
• Reviewed your rate limiting rules to make sure they allow at least one request every 20 seconds (required for automatic page refreshes).

​​ Step 1 — Plan out your waiting room

Before you create your waiting room, think about how you want it to appear and operate.

​​ Location

Which page will you cover with a waiting room? You can only have one waiting room per page, so you need to identify the high-traffic areas of your website.

Specify the URL for your page by setting the hostname and path in your configuration settings.

​​ Access method

You can direct visitors to your high-traffic page:

• Directly (via URL)
• Indirectly (via a redirect)

​​ Queue activation

When you activate your waiting room, choose whether:

• All visitors to be queued, in preparation for a product release or other time-based event
• Only some visitors to be queued, as traffic reaches the thresholds defined in Total active users and New users per minute

​​ Step 2 — Create your waiting room

Create your waiting room by:

• Using the dashboard.
• Using the API.

​​ Appearance (optional)

Some customers can customize the design of their waiting room by editing the page’s HTML and CSS.

If you have this ability, think about how you want the page to appear.

​​ Step 3 — Activate your waiting room

Depending on your queue activation, you may deploy your waiting room differently.

​​ Queue some visitors

To queue visitors only when necessary:

1. Go to Traffic > Waiting Rooms.
2. On a waiting room, set Enabled to On.
3. Your waiting room will begin queueing visitors once it approaches the target traffic thresholds defined in Total active users and in New users per minute.

​​ Queue all visitors

To queue all visitors prior to a time-based offering:

1. Go to Traffic > Waiting Rooms.
2. On a waiting room:
   1. Set Enabled to On.
   2. Set Queue All to On.
3. Your waiting room will begin queueing all visitors and will not allow any visitors to the path protected by your waiting room. On hover, the waiting room will show the estimated number of users in the queue.

4. To begin allowing visitors to the path protected by your waiting room, set Queue All to Off.

​​ Step 4 — Next steps

After you have created and deployed your first waiting room, you might also want to:

• Test your waiting room before it goes live.
• Monitor your traffic in real time.
• Troubleshoot Open external link potential issues.