Automated bots constantly hit websites: trying passwords, scraping content, submitting spam and sometimes flooding servers. A few protections keep most of them out.
Common threats
- Brute-force logins on admin pages.
- Form spam and fake leads.
- Content scraping.
- DDoS: traffic floods that overload the server.
Protections
- Web application firewall and CDN services such as Cloudflare. Read Cloudflare setup.
- Login protection: limit attempts, 2FA, hide or rename login URLs where supported.
- Bot challenges on forms. Read protecting forms from bots.
- Rate limiting for repeated requests.
- Good hosting with basic DDoS protection.
Robots.txt is not security
Robots.txt only guides well-behaved crawlers; bad bots ignore it. Configure it for search engines with our robots.txt generator.
Clean polluted data
Remove fake entries from lead lists with our phone number cleaner.
Want the full picture? This article is part of Business websites: the complete guide, our in-depth guide with everything in one place.
