How to Stop Bad Bots: A Guide For WordPress Users

Half of all internet traffic isn’t human activity — it’s bots. Spambots, search bots, Twitterbots, and DDoS bots are just a few common types of web robots. They’re everywhere in the online world, and not all of them are bad. But some of them are bad, and bad bots can be more than a nuisance. They can disrupt your WordPress site’s functionality, slow down your workflow, and drive away your users or customers.

When it’s time to stop bad bots from meddling with your WordPress site, some approaches work better than others. Fortunately, WordPress gives us several practical solutions for dealing with bots.

In this guide, we’ll discuss what bots are, why some are good, how you can block the bad ones, and how to keep them from harming your WordPress site. By the end, you’ll have all the answers needed to handle WordPress bot protection. Let’s take a look.

Key Points

• Site owners can manually ban known bad IPs and user agents while whitelisting legitimate bots to maintain site functionality and security.
• Bots can be beneficial or harmful, with bad bots causing disruptions and security threats to WordPress sites.
• Malicious bots engage in harmful activities such as data theft, DDoS attacks, credential stuffing, web scraping, and spam distribution.
• To protect WordPress sites from bad bots, users can use dedicated security solutions, with real-time security logs and CAPTCHA options.

What Is a Bot?

As you probably already figured out, the term “bot” is short for “robot”. Sometimes, people refer to the bots we’re discussing here as “internet bots” or “web bots”. To put it simply, a bot is software that operates as an independent user agent for a person or a larger command-and-control program that directs the actions of many bots.

For good and bad reasons, people often use bots to simulate the activity of real humans browsing the web and carrying out repetitive tasks. Bots are quite a bit faster than people at performing mundane tasks, so people use bots to do many simple things quickly and at scale. Generally speaking, 40-50% of all internet traffic is actually bots interacting with web pages, communicating directly with people, scanning for specific content, or performing other basic tasks.

Oftentimes you don’t benefit from these bot-driven tasks. You don’t want them, and they’re unhelpful to you. They are a waste of server and energy resources. Worse, some are malicious, and those bots pose a constant threat.

Some common types of WordPress bot are as follows:

1. Monitoring bots watch the overall health of a network or website.
2. Chatbots simulate human conversations and interact with you as another person might. 
3. Shopbots scan the internet on a user’s behalf. They might observe user website navigation patterns and customize the site for each user.
4. Social bots operate on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms.
5. Knowbots collect specific information on subjects defined by the person controlling them.
6. Spiders are used by search engines to map and index the structure and content of websites.
7. Web scraping crawlers harvest data and extract other content someone has programmed them to find.
8. Transactional bots complete transactions on behalf of a human controlling them.

What Makes a Bot Bad?

A bot is considered “bad” when it is designed to perform harmful activities on the internet. These malicious bots can engage in various activities, including:

• Data theft: They gather sensitive information, such as usernames and passwords, for fraudulent purposes.
• DDoS attacks: Bad bots can overwhelm a website with traffic, rendering it inaccessible to legitimate users.
• Credential stuffing: They automate login attempts using stolen credentials to gain unauthorized access to user accounts.
• Web scraping: Malicious bots extract data from websites without permission, potentially leading to data breaches or content theft.
• Spam distribution: They generate and spread unwanted content across platforms, damaging reputations and user experiences.

In essence, bad bots are characterized by their intent to disrupt, steal, or manipulate online environments, posing significant risks to businesses and users alike. Their actions can result in financial losses, compromised security, and degraded service quality.

How Do I Block Bad Bots In WordPress?

It’s important to learn how to stop bot traffic that WordPress can’t stop on its own. Bad bots pose real threats, and they do substantial harm every day. Your WordPress site is one of their targets, and you should block them.

Learning how to stop bot traffic in WordPress begins with understanding that a bad bot is simply one that hits your WordPress site with no benefit to you as the site owner.

Bad bots consume a lot of server resources. This is especially true if they continually hit your wp-login page or other areas of your site, looking for a way to break in.

By blocking bad bots in WordPress, you won’t need to deal with as much server stress. You’ll be able to save on hosting costs and bandwidth. This will speed up your site and prevent DDoS attacks.

Here’s how to get started with WordPress bot protection:

1. Get the Free Solid Security Plugin

The first step is to install the free Solid Security plugin. Solid Security is a robust WordPress security plugin that enhances your site’s protection against various threats, including bot attacks.

By using Solid Security, you gain access to a real-time security log that monitors and collects security events on your website, including bot activity.

Using a plugin like Solid Security to generate WordPress security logs is beneficial for your overall website security strategy. Logs equip you to:

• Identify and stop malicious behavior.
• Spot activity that can alert you of a security breach.
• Assess damage in the event of a breach.
• Aid in the repair of a hacked site.

If your site is compromised, having detailed logs will support a quick investigation and recovery.

2. Get Solid Security Pro and Choose a CAPTCHA for User Registration, Reset Password, Login, and Comments

WordPress sites are frequently targeted by bots attempting to break into login forms with stolen or guessed passwords, send form spam and spam comments, or scrape and steal your content.

With one of Solid Security Pro’s paid plans, you can choose from various CAPTCHA providers like Cloudflare’s noCAPTCHA Turnstile, hCaptcha, and Google’s reCAPTCHA to keep bad WordPress bots out of your website. These CAPTCHAs will help identify legitimate visitors while allowing them to log in or create accounts without unnecessary challenges.

To get started with your chosen CAPTCHA service, enable the feature under Security > Settings > Features > Firewall.

3. Automatically Identify and Block Bad Bots with Local Brute Force Protection

Both the Free and Pro editions of Solid Security can automatically ban bad bots and users that repeatedly fail login attempts or use common usernames. This behavior is typical of bots executing brute-force login attempts. To enable Local Brute Force Protection, go to the settings page and adjust the configurations under Security > Settings > Features > Firewall.

By reducing the number of allowed login attempts, you can lock out users and WordPress bots that repeatedly enter invalid credentials on the wp-login page.

4. Automatically Identify and Block Bad Bots with Network Brute Force Protection

A highly effective way to protect your site from bad bots is by opting into Solid Security’s network sharing feature. When you block bad bots in WordPress, this information is shared within the network, helping you benefit from collective knowledge and blocklists.

5. Identify and Block Lists of Bad Bots Manually

Your Solid Security dashboard provides an overview of important real-time information, including brute force attack attempts and blocked bots or users. This visual display reflects data collected in your security logs.

Familiarize yourself with your security logs under Security > Logs to observe lockouts (bad login attempts) and detected brute-force attempts.

Solid Security identifies suspicious requests that differ from typical human activity; repetitive requests from a single IP often indicate bot activity.

Increase lockout times for repeat offenders in your settings to strengthen security further.

6. Permanently Ban Large Lists of Bad IPs and User Agents

You can permanently ban multiple IPs using the Ban Users feature on your Solid Security dashboard while being cautious not to overload your server with excessive entries. Find this via Security > Settings > Features > Firewall.

Blocking known bad user agents is another effective strategy for blacklisting bots. Solid Security allows integration with updated sources like Jim Walker’s ban list from HackRepair for efficient management of harmful user agents.

Keep in mind, bots like Googlebot are legitimate and don’t need to be blocked — in fact, you can whitelist them using a current list of beneficial bots.

Blocking Bad Bots In WordPress Will Make Your Life Easier

Bad bots pose significant threats to WordPress sites, disrupting functionality and compromising security. Understanding the types of bots and their potential harm is crucial for site owners. Implementing effective strategies can significantly mitigate these risks. 
Solid Security Pro offers features like real-time security logs, CAPTCHA options, and both local and network brute force protection to keep malicious bots at bay. By using our premium plugin, you’ll improve your site’s defense against unwanted bot traffic in WordPress while ensuring a smoother experience for legitimate users. Protect your website today and manage bad bots effectively with Solid Security Pro!