Stop Abusive Traffic Upstream
When abuse is automated, UI fixes won’t help. You need an edge‑first posture that filters hostile requests before they reach PHP or your database. A web application firewall (WAF) and a capable CDN can apply IP reputation, cadence thresholds, header‑entropy checks, and soft challenges that real users pass transparently. This keeps compute costs predictable and makes your logs legible, which in turn speeds up investigations when behavior changes.
Start with allowlists for known partners and editorial networks. Then layer rules that address the main scrape patterns you see in logs: bursts against feeds and search, aggressive media fetching, or crawling that ignores robots directives. Build multi‑signal decisions rather than single‑trigger blocks; scrapers rotate IPs and user agents, but their timing and path choices often betray them. Prefer temporary, decaying bans so today’s mitgations don’t become tomorrow’s outage.
Keep WAF rules simple and documented. Complex expressions are brittle and hard to reason about under pressure. Use dashboards to visualize request rates and unique fingerprints, and run small experiments with new thresholds before rolling them out permanently. Performance should improve, not degrade; if latency rises for legitimate users, your edge configuration is too heavy or fights with caching.
Finally, coordinate with your on‑site measures. If media is a target, delivery controls and watermarks reduce resale value even when downloads happen. If PDFs leak, signed URLs and short‑lived tokens limit exposure. Treat each vector—text, media, files—as part of one system so the weak link doesn’t undo the rest of your work.
Related Pages (this 10‑page cluster)
Understand the menu of options in Copy Protection Tools; it compares client scripts, UI cues, and edge policies so your WAF/CDN strategy aligns with on‑page deterrents.
For human behavior on articles, Prevent Text Copying provides template‑scoped nudges that discourage long selections while keeping accessibility and keyboard navigation uncompromised.
UI blocks like Disable Right Click can complement edge rules on sensitive templates, but they won’t affect scraping; use them sparingly and measure complaints.
Dive deeper into patterns and logging with Prevent Content Scraping; it covers detection, caching, and randomization that lower scraper ROI without hurting real visitors.
If bots fetch image routes aggressively, Protect WordPress Media and Prevent Hotlinking explain overlays, watermarks, and referrer checks that cut off value and bandwidth theft.
Documents need special care. Secure PDF Downloads uses gates, signatures, and non‑indexing to keep premium files controlled and traceable.
Keep configurations safe to change with WordPress Security Overview; governance, updates, backups, and headers make edge defenses sustainable for your team.
When takedowns are required, Protect Intellectual Property shows how to turn evidence into calm, proportional actions that resolve issues quickly.