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We map what you actually need.
A single scoping call, then a written plan: what gets built, what it costs, and when it ships. No discovery-phase invoices, no moving targets.
Client work
Bots Crashing a Store Through Its Product Filter
A store kept going down under load. The traffic was real, but it was not customers — bots were hammering the product filter, and every combination generated another expensive query.
Australian-based team
Senior developers only
Fixed quote before we start
100k+
Bot requests hitting the filter
10%
CPU use after mitigation
Hours
To restore stability
WooCommerce
SiteGround
Cloudflare
Australian team
Based here, working your hours — not a timezone away
144+ projects delivered
Over 10+ years building and maintaining sites for Australian businesses
One developer, start to finish
The same person every time — no re-explaining your site
Straight answers, on your terms
We only take work we can finish. Ask us anything first — no obligation
The challenge
- The site was crashing repeatedly and the hosting CPU allowance was exhausted.
- Traffic looked high, which made it easy to mistake an attack for success.
- The target was the product filter — faceted URLs generate near-infinite combinations, each one an uncached database query.
- Any fix had to keep genuine shoppers and search engine crawlers getting through.
What we did
- Read the SiteGround and site logs together to separate customer traffic from automated traffic, and confirmed the filter endpoints were the target.
- Moved the site behind Cloudflare so requests could be judged before they reached the origin at all.
- Wrote rules aimed specifically at the filter parameters rather than the site as a whole — blunt site-wide blocking would have caught real shoppers.
- Tuned the rules against live traffic so legitimate browsing and search crawlers continued through untouched.
The outcome
- Site stable within hours.
- CPU use fell to around 10%, from exhausting the plan’s allowance.
- Memory use dropped correspondingly — the load had been almost entirely automated.
- Same hosting plan, no upgrade required. The capacity was always there; it was being spent on bots.
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