GoHighLevel Webhooks: Building a Reliable Receiver

Choose where webhooks come from

There are two common sources. Marketplace apps subscribe to events across every account that installs them. Workflow webhook actions send data from a specific automation inside one sub-account. Marketplace webhooks suit products serving many accounts; workflow webhooks suit a single business that wants to push specific moments into another system.

Event names, payload shapes, and signing details change over time, so confirm them against GoHighLevel's current developer documentation before you build.

Verify before you trust

Your webhook URL is public, so anyone can send requests to it. When the source signs its payloads, verify the signature against the raw request body before parsing it. For workflow webhooks without a signature, add your own shared secret in a header or query value and reject requests that do not carry it.

Acknowledge fast, process later

Return a 200 response as soon as the payload is verified and stored, then do the real work in a background job. Slow handlers time out, timeouts trigger retries, and retries without safeguards turn one event into several.

A simple durable queue — even a database table of pending events — is enough for most businesses and gives you a record of every event you received.

Expect duplicates and out-of-order events

Treat every event as something that might arrive twice or arrive after a newer event for the same record. Store an event or record identifier and skip anything already processed. When updating a record, compare timestamps so an older event never overwrites newer data.

Monitor the pipeline

Log each event received, processed, failed, and retried with a correlation ID. Alert when failures repeat or when an endpoint that normally sees traffic goes quiet during business hours — silence is often the first sign that a subscription or workflow was changed.