How Bot Mitigation Increases Website Load Speed

Nothing is more frustrating than a slow website.

Website speed and page load time are one of the most important determinants of an online business’s success. Business heads, digital marketers, and CTOs are always striving to implement new techniques to improve the page load time on their websites.

Website speed matters for effective SEO

Website speed and page load time are becoming an important factor when it comes to search engine rankings. Google has indicated site speed (and as a result, page speed) is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages.

A slow website is bad not only for the end-user but also for search engine optimization (SEO). Meaning, it can cause a site to rank lower in search engine results. Pages with a longer load time tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page. That translates to fewer page views and less ad revenue or customer conversions. Also, slow page speed means that search engines can crawl fewer pages using their allocated crawl budget, and this could negatively affect your website’s SEO.

You are not just losing conversions from visitors with slow load time on your website, but that loss is magnified to friends and colleagues of your visitors. The result - lots of potential sales down the drain just because of a few seconds of difference.

Fast-loading sites perform better on all fronts: better user experience, higher conversions, more engagement, even higher search rankings. If you are after mobile traffic, site speed becomes even more critical.

Remember that for every second you shave off of load time, you’ll tend to boost customer confidence and trust in your site, and sow the seeds that will make your customers tell others about your brand. In those cases, a few seconds can make all the difference!

Why does your website has a slow load-time?

Every website in today’s age is visited more by bots than by genuine visitors. There are good bots - the search engine bots like Googlebot, Bingbot, Yandexbot, Baidu Spider, Istella bot and 2500+ other such crawlers, and bad bots - those designed by your competitors/hackers / spammers/scrapers to commit a myriad of automated attacks. From InfiSecure's global collective intelligence data, we have seen 60–80% of every website's traffic coming from online bots. Most of this traffic is unwanted and creates a high load on the servers. This automated web traffic exhausts the parallel processing capabilities of the CPU and slows down response times from the server for genuine users.

How to make your website load faster by implementing bot mitigation solution?

There are various ways to optimize website load time such as building a faster-executing code, implementing caching, using a CDN, etc. Bot mitigation is one of the essential and useful ways t improve website load time.

The unwanted bot traffic, which has grown multi-folds on the Internet in the last few years, has become a significant factor in deciding a website's load time. One way to counter this is to increase server capacity and keep on adding machines. The better way, however, is to deploy a real-time bot detection and mitigation platform. This not only improves the website speed but also eliminates all automated attacks that affect a website's key business metrics.

There are two ways in which a bot mitigation solution can benefit your online business:

1. Improved browsing speed for genuine customers – When automated web traffic crawls a website to commit nefarious activities on your site, a lot of server processing is required to accommodate the excessive bot traffic. When a real-time bot mitigation platform is deployed, this unwanted traffic gets blocked, and the server resources are freed up. This reduction in CPU load improves the processing of genuine requests at a faster rate and the server-side response time decreases significantly. Thus, significant improvement in page load is seen.


2. Optimized server bandwidth and server space – Bot mitigation strategy can help you improve server bandwidth and save server space by a considerable amount. For instance, when a bot requests a page on the website, bandwidth is consumed to fetch the request from the server to the browser. Now, online businesses get vast amounts of web traffic. If a page requests by a bot consumes 1MB, and a website receives 1 million bot hits in a month that are not business friendly, we are talking about saving 1 TB of server bandwidth.

At InfiSecure, we have seen drastic performance improvements in website speed for our customers. One of the websites that we protect had a load time of 70–120 seconds before bot protection. The key reason was 82% total bot traffic, 60% unwanted bots, and heavy charges on the server, which made the business not add more machines. After InfiSecure integration, the bots stopped getting through and the website load time dropped to 3 seconds. So, the whole time, the website owners had a fast working website, the only thing slowing them down was excessive bot traffic.