We have recently developed and released a Bot Blocker plugin. In this short post, we would like to tell you more about the plugin and why you need to install it on your website.
What are bots?
Bots and crawlers have become rather common for today’s web, they monitor your traffic and collect the information for the search engines and open-source projects. While there are some useful bots, such as Google, Yahoo or Bing crawlers, which help your website get higher rankings with search engines, there are more and more useless and even malicious bots, which your website does not need.
How bad bots may affect your website
Malicious bots and crawlers may send multiple, repeated queries to your website, what is worse, there may be 10 or even more bots crawling your website simultaneously. This, of course, overloads your server, consumes bandwidth and reduces page speed load. As a result, your users have to deal with a slow website and high response time.
Solution to malicious bots
To free your website from bad and useless bots, we have developed a Bot Blocker plugin that you may install and it will work behind the scenes without requiring your involvement. Understanding that a plugin like this one is essential for classifieds, which may be a target of various bots, we have made this plugin free to all of our users.
After installing the plugin, the malicious bot trying to access your website will encounter a 403 Error page making it impossible to further crawl your website or send queries to your server.
Plugin Configurations
When developing a plugin, we have already populated it with a list of malicious crawlers, so, when you access the plugin manager in the admin panel, you will see a list of bots separated by a comma.
If you find more bots/crawlers that you wish to block, you may simply add them, just make sure you separate them by a comma. The other setting allows you to enable/disable a plugin; other than that, there are no other settings, so, you may install and forget about it being sure that your website will not be targeted by useless bots.
The plugin has been released and is available to all Flynax customers. You may install and activate it right from admin panel, just like any other plugin.