Strange Website Traffic: What’s Happening?

TL;DR

You’re seeing unusual website traffic – likely bots or potentially malicious activity. This guide helps you identify the source, understand what they’re doing, and take steps to protect your site.

1. Check Your Analytics

Start with your web analytics (like Google Analytics). Look for patterns that don’t seem right:

• Bounce Rate: Are visitors leaving immediately? A very high bounce rate suggests they aren’t interested in your content.
• Session Duration: Are sessions unusually short or long?
• Pages per Session: Are visitors only viewing one page, or are they browsing multiple pages?
• Geographic Location: Is traffic coming from unexpected countries?
• Devices & Browsers: Are you seeing a lot of traffic from unusual devices or old browsers?

Filter your data by date range to focus on the period when you noticed the strange activity.

2. Examine Your Server Logs

Server logs provide detailed information about every request made to your website. Accessing these depends on your hosting provider (e.g., cPanel, Plesk, SSH access).

• IP Addresses: Identify the IP addresses generating the most traffic.
• User Agents: The user agent string identifies the browser and operating system. Suspicious user agents are a red flag (e.g., empty strings, bot names).
• Requested URLs: What pages are these visitors accessing? Are they targeting specific files or admin areas?

You can often download server logs as text files and analyze them using tools like grep (on Linux/macOS) or log analysis software.

grep 'suspicious_user_agent' access.log

3. Identify Common Bot Types

Several types of bots can cause strange traffic:

• Good Bots: Search engine crawlers (Googlebot, Bingbot) are essential for SEO.
• Scrapers: These bots steal content from your website.
• Spambots: Used to submit spam comments or create fake accounts.
• DDOS Bots: Attempt to overwhelm your server with traffic, causing downtime.

Use online tools like BotCrawl or BuiltWith to identify bots visiting your site.

4. Block Suspicious IP Addresses

Once you’ve identified malicious IPs, block them:

• .htaccess (Apache): Add the following lines to your .htaccess file (be careful when editing this file!):

  Order Allow,Deny
  Deny from [IP Address]
  Allow from all

• cPanel/Plesk: Most hosting control panels have IP blocking features.
• Firewall: Implement a web application firewall (WAF) like Cloudflare or Sucuri to automatically block malicious traffic.

5. Use CAPTCHAs

Implement CAPTCHAs on forms (login, comment, contact) to prevent automated submissions by bots.

6. Strengthen Your cyber security

• Keep Software Updated: Regularly update your CMS (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal), plugins, and themes.
• Strong Passwords: Use strong, unique passwords for all accounts.
• Two-Factor Authentication: Enable two-factor authentication wherever possible.

7. Consider a CDN

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) can help distribute your website’s traffic across multiple servers, making it more resilient to DDOS attacks.

8. Monitor Regularly

Continuously monitor your analytics and server logs for any new suspicious activity. cyber security is an ongoing process.