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If you own a website, you surely watch your traffic trends graphs. Probably once a day. The way the tools are setup, it is often too cumbersome and not very high value to keep a constant watch on it.

However, as web security becomes a greater concern, traffic trends are not only indicators of how popular your product or company is; but are also an important source of detecting when something is not just right. How so?

  • It is an arms race. Attackers are constantly improving. If you are not constantly monitoring and improving, they will get through..
  • Some companies shut shop after a hack. CEOs lose their jobs (yes, it has happened). Almost all victims struggle to rebuild their reputation*
  • Contrary to popular belief, most attackers don't want to deface your website. They want to "control" your webserver and keep using it for their benefit. Without your knowledge. While you keep paying for it.
Sudden spikes of unusual traffic:
  • Spikes could be caused by poorly designed SEO attempts. Yes, we've seen that.
  • It could also be a bot attempting to get through. We've seen some sites' 70% traffic come from such bots.
Sudden rise of usual server-side errors
  • These are not often reported by most tools. Errors could be caused by faulty programming on parts of your website (usually bad links to web page components). While not fatal, they do impact your user experience and are best fixed quickly.
  • Equally often, errors are also an important indicator of an attack on your website. An attack that could be more than the usual mass attacks.

When you detect it promptly and take defensive action, the attacker gets a clear message. This website as an active defender on the watch. The attacker usually moves on, to less protected targets.

In our previous post titled Why should you continually monitor your website?, we discussed the importance of keeping a close watch. When you do that with ActiFend, you also get the benefits of seeing traffic trends - on the mobile phone. It is a double-benefit. You get to see the overall impact of your marketing efforts, plus you are alert to any potential harm by attackers.

Watch your traffic trends and more with ActiFend. No credit card needed for the 30-day free trial.

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