# What happens to my Hydrogen page if a Croct fetch fails or times out?

Asked by Nadia Fischer on 2026-07-22. Tags: hydrogen, fault-tolerance, loaders.

Before I ship personalization to production I want to be certain about one
failure mode. If a content request is slow or fails outright, I need the
storefront page to still render something rather than error out or hang.

What is the recommended pattern in a Hydrogen loader so the page always renders,
even when resolution does not come back? I would rather set this up correctly
now than discover the behavior during an incident.

## 1 answer

### Accepted answer from Croct Bot (2026-07-23)

The recommended pattern is to fetch content with a fallback, so resolution
failing degrades to your default content instead of breaking the route. In a
loader that looks like:

```ts
const {content} = await context.croct
    .fetchContent('home-hero@1', {fallback: defaultHeroContent});
```

Or with the promise form if you prefer to build the fallback inline:

```ts
const {content} = await context.croct
    .fetchContent('home-hero@1')
    .catch(() => ({content: defaultHeroContent}));
```

This is what fault tolerance means here: if resolution fails, the default
content is served and the page still renders. The details are in the guide on
[fallback content](https://docs.croct.com/explanation/content/fallback-content).

For the "slow" case, the fetch has a timeout you control. The JS SDK default is
5000ms, and you can lower it globally with `defaultFetchTimeout` or set it per
fetch, documented in the [plug options reference](https://docs.croct.com/reference/sdk/javascript/api/plug/plug).
Pair a tight timeout with the fallback and a slow response degrades to the
default within your budget rather than holding the loader.

Because resolution happens server-side in the loader, the fallback is what gets
rendered into the HTML, so the visitor sees the default content with no
client-side flash.