How would you feel if your Magento store’s traffic doubles up overnight? While getting more traffic is always a dream for website owners, a sudden spike in traffic can be quite concerning. This is because Magento sudden increase in traffic can be an indication that your Magento store has been caught in a DoS or DDoS attack.
Most of the time, your store is crawled by good bots like Google spider to boost up your SEO. But that hardly shows extreme fluctuations in your normal store traffic.
On the contrary, malicious bots can cause server overload by bombarding your store with fake bot traffic.
Ecommerce platforms like Magento are often an easy target for hackers. As per a figure put forward by Incapsula, 62% of website traffic contains automated bots.
4 reasons responsible for Magento sudden increase in traffic
Hence, it becomes imperative to safeguard your site from malicious attempts. It is also important to note here that unauthorized bot traffic can also impact analytics metrics like session duration, page views, and bounce rates. Moreover, the deviation in the metrics can be challenging for the Magento site owner.
So let’s find out possible reasons for Magento sudden increase in traffic.
1. Antivirus
Many of the reasons behind sudden traffic surges are related to security issues. Be it DNS attacks or malicious traffic, you can witness sudden rise in traffic which can severely affect your Magento site. Moreover, software updates and virus scans distributed inside the LAN are a very common source of traffic spikes. However, these can be dealt with by altering the scan settings and updating your site during non-business hours.
2. Traffic emanating from malware
Hacking attempts and malware outbreaks can give rise to sudden traffic spikes. These spikes occur either to cover up other malicious activities or the malware is attempting to forcefully login to other devices.
3. Hacking bots
The most accepted and hazardous usage of spam bots is hacking your online store information. But apart from that, these bots can also spike up your site traffic. Typically, these spam bots steal personal information and credit card numbers of your customers. They can also inject malware into your site. And while doing all these, they spike up the traffic on your website to cover their trail. To be precise, since the last three years, there have been various releases of security upgrades for Magento 1 to curb the issue. You can go through the Magento security manual to learn to plug the security holes in your site.
It is a widely observed fact that a mail server continuously delivers the same mail through the servers of the company. If there is an incompatibility between the two SMTP implementations, it would give rise to an endless feedback loop. You can solve this issue by accessing the target mail server to stop giving access rights to the remote server.
Block bad bots by using Magento extension
The Magento CMS, nowadays, powers almost 25% of all e-commerce websites. So there is no doubt that it is one of the most admired CMS for e-commerce. Moreover, Magento is one of the most hacked CMS after Shopify. Thus it only makes sense to secure your Magento store from all targeted attacks. Opting for a Magento Security Extension is the best bet here.
With a security extension, you can monitor website traffic and block all unwelcome visitors like spam crawlers, bad bots, and malicious spiders. After the visitor is identified as a bot by assessing the user agent string, he/she would be forwarded directly to the blacklist.
How Astra stops bad bot attacks with its firewall?
With Astra, you don’t have to run from place to place to secure your Magento store. Astra has everything you need to manage your security in one place. Security tools like WAF and Malware Scanner ensure that your Magento store is protected against all ills.
So here is the list of ways through which Astra stops bad bots:
- Blocks spam bots with 24×7 real-time protection
- Monitors blacklists
- Facilitates brute-force protection
- Astra’s Magento malware scanner provides you with unlimited scans
- The malware scanner is fully automated and hence you don’t have to worry about your site’s security if you forgot to run scans
- Carries out a comprehensive security audit of your Magento store
- Provides you with VAPT services
As evident from the above-mentioned points, spam bots are an integral part of your Magento store. Moreover, there is no remedy for it except to opt for Magento security extension. The Astra firewall proves to be a great investment on your part to stop malicious bots from stealing your data and checks Magento sudden increase in traffic.
In case you have other tactics to stem the flow of malicious bots, kindly comment below.