Twitter Cards Validation Error

Twitter have had a neat feature for a while now that allows for additional information to be included with a tweet that is then displayed when you expand the tweet. This is how it looks:

Card on the Web

Card on the Web

And on a mobile client:

Card on a mobile device

Card on a mobile device

To enable these you need to set-up some meta data on your website (there is a good guide here) and then validate this information with Twitter here. When I did so I was greeted by the following message:

ERROR: FetchError:exceeded 4.seconds to Portal.Pink-constructor-safecore while waiting for a response for the request, including retries (if applicable) (Card error)

This message while not the most clear means that your website is taking too long to return the requested page, more than four seconds in fact. This led me on a journey to try and get the response time down to something respectable because if Twitter was having problems you can bet that potential customers would be experiencing the same thing.

In the end, in our case,  I determined that the server was underpowered and so threw some resources at it and the problem went away. Given that Twitter cards are free and easy to set-up I would thoroughly recommend  doing so, they even work through link shorteners as you can see from the images above.

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