How to Block Bad Bots: Safeguarding Your WordPress Site
Bot Traffic on websites has been increasing for small or large businesses globally. These traffic bots are crawling every website they can find, including spam bots and cause some serious SEO damage to websites. They usually find a way, by using open backdoors of a website or gaining access to a less-protected network to target the site. Traffic bots can create an abnormally high bounce rate, abnormally high and low session views, generate a huge amount of traffic on the site, false account generation and many more such consequences to bot traffic attacks. So if you observe anomalies (generally spikes) in your web traffic, your site might be a target of a traffic bot attack. An increase in Bot Traffic leads to an increase in website traffic, which leads to an increase in false data, false data is of no use to any company.
In this blog, we will see the common bot traffic attacks on WordPress sites, and how we can prevent bot traffic attacks.
Why does your organization need a Reverse Proxy to secure WordPress websites and cloud applications to prevent bot traffic?
The 4 most common bad bot attacks used on WordPress sites are:
1. Spam Bots: Bot traffic can be used for spamming any webpage or cloud application with various comments or unwanted traffic. To mitigate these issues, it’s crucial to implement measures to block bot activities.
2.DDS Attacks: Bot traffic will attack the application which will create huge traffic and take your site down with a Denial of Service attack. To safeguard against such attacks, proactive steps to block bot infiltration should be taken.
3.Ad Fraud: Bot traffic will visit the advertisement present on your application and affect the ad clicks, which will affect the cost of the advertisement. This deceptive behavior may involve fraudulent clicks on ads, along with suspicious Bot Comments.
4.Content Scraping: Bot traffic can be used for extracting data from the application, including sensitive content, damaging the SEO of your WordPress website. This could also include instances where bots generate automated Bot Comments on your content.
According to many resources, around 20-30% of Cloud Applications traffic is equipped by Traffic Bot. This tells us that 20-30% money is wasted on these Bot Traffic attacks. Bot Traffic attacks don’t majorly harm the Cloud App security but it does affect the analytics of the Cloud Applications in measures like bounce rate, session duration, location of the user and many more. These attacks can cost a lot to companies who have online or website presence. Hence, implementing strategies to effectively block bot traffic is very important in maintaining the health and performance of your digital platforms.
By using a reverse proxy you won’t need any other solution to filter bot traffic from Google Analytics
In a typical scenario, the bot traffic enters the network one by one and begins attacking the system without the user’s knowledge. However, by the time the user becomes aware of the automated traffic bot attacks, it is too late because the bots have already entered the system. However, using a reverse proxy to block bot traffic from entering the system, ensures that your data remains safe and secure. If bot traffic is not managed properly, it can cause serious issues such as overloading servers, slowing down services, and even a DDoS attack. Bot traffic, including spam bots, is bad for business since certain WordPress websites rely on advertising, and traffic bots, including spam bots will increase the number of advertisement hits, which will cost the organization a lot of money.
How to block bot traffic on a WordPress site using Reverse Proxy?
A reverse proxy stands as the ultimate solution to filter bot traffic and prevent any kind of bot attacks. Before any user, bot or human reaches your website their request will first go to the reverse proxy. After the reverse proxy confirms the user to not be a BOT, only then the user will be redirected to the proxied site (original site).
Bot attacks without a Reverse Proxy
Let’s say the company has a Cloud Application or a WordPress website that has advertisements going on regarding their product. For that particular advertisement, the company has to pay $1 per click. But the company has too many Spam Bot and Traffic Bot attacks. Suppose the company has a total Traffic Bot attack of around 30%. The company has to bear the loss of $30 as the 30 clicks of the advertisements are blocked by bots or stopped by bot attacks, rendering them wasted.
Bot attacks with a Reverse Proxy
Now let’s introduce Reverse proxy and secure cloud applications or WordPress websites by putting them behind a reverse proxy. Now when Traffic Bot, including Spam Bot comes across the network, reverse proxy will prevent bot traffic from coming to the WordPress website and affecting the analytics. Reverse proxy will analyze bi-directional web-based (HTTP) traffic and allows you to monitor, detect and block bot traffic to your web applications.
Implementation of miniOrange Reverse Proxy to stop Bot traffic on a website:
The network’s incoming and outgoing traffic is monitored by the traffic monitoring system. It gathers information on network traffic, speed, and classifications and generates an analysis report for traffic management. When you use miniOrange Reverse Proxy, it acts as a mediator between the Backend Site and the Users. Whenever any request comes from the user to the server, it is scanned to check if it is a genuine request or if some Bad bots trying to access the cloud applications or WordPress website. The miniOrange Reverse Proxy server will accept all the requests and verify if it is genuine or not. If the request is genuine then it will be given access and redirected to the backend site. However, if any malicious request originates from spam bots, then the request will be blocked by the bot or stopped by the bot itself and won’t be allowed to move further.
In Summary
Reverse proxy becomes one of the mandates for organizational infrastructure, given the need and efficacy necessary for security within organizations. It can be useful for Cloud workload protection to block bot traffic or stop bot traffic, removing irrelevant or unnecessary incoming traffic and safeguarding against cyber-attack vulnerabilities. Aside from protecting against bot traffic attacks, reverse proxy is extremely scalable, adaptable, and efficient and also provides other features like load balancing, rate limiting, URL rewriting, and many more. So, if you’re looking to establish a Reverse proxy for your company, miniOrange fits the bill with world-class service and reasonable pricing.
So what are you waiting for? Drop us a query at info@xecurify.com and we will get right back to you to address all your needs.
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