https://www.archeryclub.co.uk/
CPU usage. Only happening in the last couple of weeks. Seems to be related to some increasing traffic for no obvious reason, it’s a small local archery club. I wonder if it’s bots? It’s a tiny site with barely any plugins
My question is, what is the best way I can diagnose what is causing this issue, with the tools available to me? Just today it looks like number of visitors going down, but CPU spiking!
first off, this link from admin might help:
Have you made any changes to your site recently, even updating content?
What framework\plugins are you using on your site?
While the sudden “peeks” in visitors might be bots, the CPU usage is unusually high for the low the hits are on the graph above. My guess is that something on your site is using an unually high amount of CPU time, such as Elementor…
Thanks, the last change I made was to change the theme on 12th March and updated some plugins on 4th April. I’ve deactivated some plugins today just to see if that helps, but being unable to see where the bulk of processsing is happening ties my hands a bit, although it does seem to connect to the sudden increase in traffic. Wordfence is installed but not blocking anything .
I would recommend uninstalling it.
It’ll just use a ton of computing power on itself. It’s not like that free hosting doesn’t have bot protection at all so the plugin will give you very limited benefits if any.
Appreciate that, but this the only site (I run 2 small charity sites on here) which is exhibiting this behaviour and wordfence is on all of them.
Do the other 2 get similar levels of traffic to this one?
Remember word fence won’t use any CPU time unless you have visitors
Sounds very likely it’s bot traffic, especially if traffic suddenly increased without any real-world reason.
High CPU usage on a small site usually means too many automated requests (scrapers, spam bots, or even bad crawlers). First, check your server logs or analytics to see unusual IPs or spikes in requests.
Quick fixes: enable bot protection (Cloudflare or similar), block suspicious IPs, and limit crawl rate via robots.txt. Also make sure there’s no brute-force or spam hitting login/forms.
Thanks Adam. I’m on a free plan so don’t have access to sever logs or detailed analytics. (that I know of)
No problem! Since you’re on the free plan, you could try setting up a third-party tool like Statcounter or GoatCounter. They’re usually pretty lightweight and can give you a much clearer picture of where those hits are coming from without needing server-level access.
Can you list all the plugins you have installed?
Note that JavaScript based trackers won’t work well since users with adblockers or script blockers (like many bots) will not trigger them.
I’ve deactivated all the plugins to see what happens next, thanks all for your help. It may just be that the free hosting can’t cope with the level of traffic, even though it seems pretty low. Will see
