Published: 30/10/2020

Are Bots Slowing Down Your Website?

  • Netacea, Agentless Bot Management

3 minutes read

Bad bots are disrupting your website performance, reducing performance and speed. Bot activity, both good and bad, affects all industries including retail, online gambling and gaming and streaming.

In our blog we discuss the detrimental impact of bots to your website performance and subsequently, the customer experience, with advice for detecting and mitigating bad bot activity.

How does a slow website impact your business?

A better website equals better sales performance. Slow loading times frustrate customers and results in lost conversions, with online shoppers more likely to abandon websites or apps that take more than 10 seconds to load. Based on this estimate, retail, online gambling and gaming and streaming businesses could be losing out on customer revenue.

There are ways to tell if your website has been visited by a bot and keep it running smoothly:

BOTS ARE SLOWING DOWN YOUR SERVER PERFORMANCE

When bad bots make thousands of page visits within a very short space of time, they strain servers and the available bandwidth, slowing down the site for genuine users.

THEY’RE ALSO SLOWING DOWN YOUR WEBSITE

Site speed can be affected when numerous bots enter your website at the same time.

A vast amount of bad bots entering a website at once is often an attempt to overrun the servers and take the site, this is known as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

For example, a Netacea client – a global sportsbook organisation was able to drastically reduce the consumption of its web-facing infrastructure when Netacea successfully stopped scraper bots on their website. This large volume of unpredictable traffic was threatening website availability for everyday customers.

CHECK YOUR STATS

Monitoring your site speed metrics is important. Most bots will visit the same website regularly, even several times a day. If website load times suddenly slow down, this could indicate a spike in bot traffic, or as mentioned earlier a DDoS attack. Bot interactions can also skew analytics and give you false data that impacts marketing and other business decisions.

PROTECT THE USER EXPERIENCE

Slow site performance can incur costs and frustrate users. Due to the sluggish nature and slow experience of a website, any genuine users who try to visit your site or make a purchase at a time when the site is running slowly, will typically leave and take their business somewhere else.

A large amount of bots hitting your site too often within a short period of time, will slow down your site’s backend performance, causing more harm than good.

Without proactive and pre-emptive solutions in place, spikes in inbound web traffic can put additional strains on the website experience when website and app infrastructure cannot support the additional visitors. This leads to a poor customer experience, website or app failure, and of course impacts revenue, customer satisfaction and brand reputation.

Talk to the Netacea team today to find out how our best-of-breed bot management technology can protect your website, mobile app and APIs from automated attacks such as scraping, credential stuffing and fake account creation. Alternatively, watch our recent webinar with Forrester analyst Sandy Carielli on-demand, What Lies Beneath Your Website Traffic?

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