I recorded this walkthrough to show how to monitor bot traffic hitting your website — something most site owners completely overlook. Here’s the video:
Bots hit every website. Some are helpful (like search engine crawlers), but others slow down your server, skew analytics, or even scrape content. In this tutorial, I show how to use tools like Cloudways, Google Analytics, and server logs to spot bot activity.
Key methods I go over include:
- Checking server logs (like access logs and raw traffic data)
- Using Cloudways analytics to see spike patterns
- Filtering traffic by suspicious user agents
- Blocking obvious bots via .htaccess or firewall rules
You can also compare traffic behavior — bot hits often visit dozens of pages in seconds or bounce with no interaction.
I also touch on using third-party bot detection services or firewall tools like Cloudflare, which adds an extra layer of bot protection automatically.
Understanding your bot traffic helps you keep analytics clean, protect bandwidth, and reduce unnecessary load on your site.
Have you ever looked into how much of your traffic isn’t human?