# Edge caching that keeps your app fast

> Pages served straight from the edge — your Airtable base barely notices the traffic.

Your pages load instantly everywhere while you stay comfortably within Airtable's API limits, even with lots of visitors.

Airtable is a great database and a poor web backend. Point a public site straight at its API and
every visitor waits on the same round trip — and the moment more than a handful arrive at once,
you're up against Airtable's rate limits.

VibeKit serves your data from a global edge cache instead. Pages load instantly everywhere, your
base sees a fraction of the traffic, and you stay comfortably within Airtable's limits even with
lots of visitors. It's on by default — there's nothing to configure.

## A cache hit never waits

The rule is serve-stale-always: if the answer is in the cache, your visitor gets it immediately.
Freshness is handled behind the scenes — by background revalidation and by invalidation — never by
making someone wait. By default a cached entry counts as fresh for one hour; after that, the next
read still returns instantly and quietly triggers a refresh in the background. If a particular
query needs a different window, your agent can override it per request.

## Spikes collapse before they reach your base

When a burst of visitors asks for the same data at once, those identical reads collapse into a
single Airtable fetch — one call serves the whole crowd. On top of that, reads are throttled per
base, so even a genuine traffic spike never hammers your base. Heavily filtered views refresh
gently in the background as people use them, which keeps them fast without piling on extra load.

## Fresh when it matters

A long-lived cache only works if you can update it on your terms. When something changes in
Airtable, refresh exactly what changed with a button or automation inside Airtable itself — see
[cache control](/products/vibekit/features/airtable-cache-control). For the few things that must reflect a change
the instant it happens, switch them to [live data](/products/vibekit/features/live-data). And if an automation
starts firing refreshes too aggressively, [flood protection](/products/vibekit/features/flood-protection) eases it
off before it can cause trouble.

## Questions this page answers

- speed up website built on airtable
- airtable api rate limit too many requests
- cache airtable data for my website
- airtable website slow to load
- how to handle traffic spikes with airtable

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Part of [VibeKit](/md/home.md) — all pages: [llms.txt](/llms.txt)