My site was the subject of a bot swarm

Last Friday, I moved my website to Cloudflare Pages.

On the following Sunday, I took a look at the website traffic.

950 requests in 24 hours.

Not bad, I thought — until I saw the breakdown:

• 🇸🇨 Seychelles – 698 requests
• 🇺🇸 United States – 212
• 🇷🇺 Russia – 37
• 🇬🇧 United Kingdom – 80
• 🇳🇱 Netherlands – 15

I only do business in the UK.

So… what exactly was going on in Seychelles?

What I Did

Within 10 minutes, I’d made a few changes:

→Blocked Seychelles by country in Cloudflare WAF
→ Blocked the specific IP address
→ Turned on Bot Fight Mode
→ Set a rate limiting rule: “Block if more than 30 requests to the same page in 10 seconds”

Result?
The bots were stopped dead.
My analytics became readable again.
And UK visitors — the ones I actually serve — could browse normally.

Why Should You Care About Bot Traffic?

If you’re running a small business website, especially one that targets a specific country or region, it’s easy to overlook where your traffic is coming from.

But if 70% of your traffic is from a bot farm in Seychelles, that’s a problem.

Here’s why it matters:

❌ It skews your analytics

You can’t trust your traffic numbers. Bounce rate, time on site, and conversion data become meaningless when most of it comes from junk bots.

❌ It wastes your resources

Even if you’re on free hosting or a CDN, bot traffic uses up bandwidth, server time, and could even trip usage limits.

❌ It could be malicious

Some bots are harmless. Others are scanning for vulnerabilities, scraping your content, or attempting brute-force logins.

❌ It may hurt your SEO

Search engines track site engagement. If 80% of your “traffic” bounces immediately, that sends bad signals to Google.

❌ It hides real insights

You won’t know which pages are actually performing or how real visitors behave if bots dominate your traffic.

Lessons Learned

I wasn’t expecting this kind of traffic so soon — especially not from outside the UK. But this experience taught me a few things:

1. Cloudflare’s free tools are incredibly useful — if you take the time to use them.
2. Don’t assume your traffic is good just because it’s “free.” It might not be friendly.
3. It pays to review your analytics — especially the country breakdown.
4. Geo-blocking is a totally valid move for solo business owners and local service providers. If you’re not selling abroad, why invite the noise?