Why do I seen an image with this website address?

Apercite is a website preview service.

When someone needs to see a preview we do not have prepared yet, our bots open a browser and visit the target website, to make a screenshot and extract some bits of informations.

This process takes some time, usually around 10 seconds. Meanwhile, we have no other choice than show a placeholder image instead of the real image. This image will read “in progress”.

We also fail at previewing some sites. This can be for many different reasons, including “bad request”, “forbidden”, “not found”, “timeout” and “failed”.

If you think there is an issue with a specific website, you can reach us by emailing support (at) apercite (dot) fr, or by leaving a message after clicking on the chat button in the bottom right hand corner of this page.

What are all the possible status images?

Here are all the default images that you'll see as placeholders. For customization, see below.

In Progress (202)

This is not an error, but we can't display the thumbnail yet.

«In progress» means we understood your request, and that we don't have a matching thumbnail yet for it. We sent a message to our spiders to retrieve it as soon as possible, and it will be automatically updated once it is finished.

Bad Request (400)

This error is most likely happening because you're trying to request an image size we do not support, or that you do not have access to.

Here is a complete list of supported sizes (note that depending on your membership status, not all sizes may be available to you):

55x55, 60x60, 80x50, 80x60, 100x75, 110x110, 120x75, 120x90, 120x120, 160x100, 160x120, 161x161, 165x165, 180x135, 180x180, 200x125, 222x150, 240x150, 240x180, 280x150, 300x300, 320x200, 320x240, 400x400, 506x253, 560x350, 560x420, 640x400, 640x480, 646x220, 800x500, 800x600, 820x312, 876x438, 900x600, 1200x630

Forbidden (403)

We do not allow this request. It can be for various reasons, including but not limited to: illegal activities, pay-to-surf websites, affiliation abuse, malformed urls, direct downloads, and more generally, anything that tries to abuse the system.

Unless there is an obvious mistake (in which case, tell our support and we'll look into it), there is a high chance that this request will continue to show this error.

Not Found (404)

Everybody knows 404, right?

In our case, it specially means that the target URL was flagged as 404, and that we can't serve a screenshot for it.

If we can, we'll send the HTTP 404 status but display a real thumbnail anyway, because 404 can be nice looking too! But you probably want to check on your side if it is what you want.

Timeout (408)

This tells you that our spiders went out of time while crawling the URL, and no previous version is useable.

Either the website is really slow (and it may end up working), or they decided to not accept our request while not closing the connection straight away.

Failed (444)

This error means we could not crawl the website. We tried, even more than once, but there is something wrong there.

Note that it does not necessarily means that the website is down or not answering, but our spiders could not crawl it.

Can I customize the placeholder images?

This feature is not yet available, but will be available very soon.

Subscribe to e-mail updates to be certain to get the information on the launch day!