If the internet is the “information superhighway,” then websites function like bustling cities, with users entering and exiting as they navigate the site. However, without the right preparations in place, what should be a smooth, seamless flow of traffic can quickly become a jam, frustrating users as the site grinds to a halt under a large load of requests–a web traffic spike.
There are multiple legitimate causes of traffic spikes—viral content, sales, and promotions that coincide with holidays or major events, and social media attention. As exciting as increased visibility can be, the sudden influx can put an immense strain on your site. Sudden spikes in web traffic can increase the risk of slow load times and crashes, contributing to user frustration and negatively impacting your website.
Of course, there are also illegitimate reasons for spikes in website traffic that can be indicative of a cyberattack or other malicious activity. A good strategy involves identifying and managing traffic spikes to create a seamless user experience and thwart any malicious activity before it becomes a larger issue.
What Causes a Sudden Spike in Traffic?
There are multiple legitimate reasons for traffic spikes. Viral content, trending social media posts, features on TV, marketing campaigns, and sales or events—think Black Friday sales or a Taylor Swift concert—and draw an influx of new users quickly. However, not all spikes are positive.
Bots
The internet is (unsurprisingly) full of bots. Many bots and automated web scrapers visit websites for legitimate purposes such as security research, search engine results, IP address mapping, vulnerability scanning, and more. Other malicious bots scrape the content from your website for unauthorized uses, fill out forms with fake information, or, in the case of eCommerce sites, the bot may be attempting to automatically purchase and hoard inventory items to resell later.
If a traffic spike is accompanied by high bounce rates and visits from known bot user agents or IPs, then it’s likely due to malicious bot activity.
For a deeper dive into this topic, check out Fighting eCommerce Bots.
Click Fraud
Click fraud occurs when a bot impersonates a legitimate visitor and behaves the way a human would, clicking on ads, buttons, or hyperlinks. The goal is to trick any bot detection or prevention services into thinking these are real users interacting with the website.
Each link is clicked many times, not just once, which can impact a company’s pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Click fraud may be used by competitors or malicious actors engaged in hacktivism activities. Click fraud can also be used to boost the search engine rankings of malicious websites, making users more likely to visit them.
If your website traffic shows high clicks but low conversions, traffic from unusual geographic regions and repeated clicks from the same IPs it’s a good indication you’re dealing with click fraud.
DDoS Attacks
DDoS attacks are mainstays of the cybercrime economy, but not all attacks are massive, large-scale efforts. Some DDoS attacks can mimic legitimate traffic, especially as attackers leverage smaller, stealthier attacks like DDoS carpet bomb attacks.
In general, sudden traffic spikes without a clear referrer, severe slowdowns and crashes, or a high volume of requests from a few IPs indicate a DDoS attack.
Misconfigured Tracking and Internal Traffic
While not malicious, human error can cause analytics to record fake spikes in traffic. Websites use trackers to collect data about a user’s browsing habits—which pages they visit, which pieces of content they interact with, etc. Cookies and tracking pixels are both examples of website trackers. If these trackers are misconfigured, say an employee accidentally adds multiple tracking tags to a portion of the site, it can result in inflated but inaccurate traffic numbers. If traffic logs show duplicate tracking codes, it’s a good indication that no spikes in traffic have occurred, but it does mean you need to review your analytics.
In other cases, an application misconfiguration can cause a redirect loop where browsers are told to reload multiple pages in succession that are redirected back to the original page. This creates a large volume of traffic that looks like a DDoS and causes application load and potentially an outage. However, the traffic is coming from real users.
What Are Some Risks That Come With a Spike in Traffic?
Traffic spikes come with several risks, the most immediate of which is slow performance, which can frustrate customers and create a negative association with your business. Phenomena like the “Reddit hug of death,” often sees websites break after links to viral content is reshared on the site, highlighting how unpredictable surges can lead to outages if infrastructure can’t handle the load.
Of course, malicious activity carries its own risks. If the unexpected traffic spike is related to a DDoS attack, it may occur during high-traffic periods, potentially leading to financial losses. Threat actors often target high-traffic websites during peak periods to maximize the damage of these attacks. Alternatively, threat actors may contact the business and offer to stop the DDoS attacks if the business pays a ransom demand, something referred to as Ransom Distributed Denial of Service (RDDoS).
Surges related to bot traffic can easily result in analytics that show inflated traffic figures that do not reflect actual user engagement. And of course, click fraud traffic can have adverse financial outcomes. Misidentifying traffic sources due to analytics errors can lead to incorrect reporting.
Impact of Traffic Spikes on Application Performance and User Experience
Ultimately, whether or not your website can handle a traffic spike comes down to your digital infrastructure. High volumes of incoming requests can overwhelm backend systems, causing slower processing of user inputs. However, with the right approach, you can turn traffic spikes into opportunities rather than challenges.
Prepare Your Website for a Sudden Spike in Traffic: 4 Strategies
The first step in preparing for sudden traffic spikes is to analyze traffic patterns. This analysis helps distinguish legitimate user spikes from potential malicious activities, allowing security teams to know when they need to implement countermeasures. Organizations can use the following metrics to baseline their normal user traffic and detect abnormal traffic:
- Source countries
- IP address netblocks
- User-Agent HTTP header
- Accept-Language HTTP header
- Referer HTTP header
- Rate of HTTP requests per minute
Once you understand normal traffic patterns you can prepare for predictable surges (e.g., a new product launch, major sale, or scheduled media coverage), and pre-scale resources in advance. An eCommerce site may prepare for a back-to-school sale by pre-caching popular pages and increasing its cloud instances.
In addition to pre-scaling resources before an expected online traffic spike, here are four strategies to protect, optimize, and scale your website:
1. Implement Scaling and Load Balancing
If the surge in traffic is coming from legitimate users, scaling up server resources and using load balancing can help distribute incoming requests across multiple servers, allowing your site to manage heavy traffic more efficiently. Some infrastructure, such as a managed DNS provider, scales up with user demand. Load balancing distributes requests evenly across multiple servers, which helps prevent crashes, improving website uptime and availability. DNS-based load balancing can provide redundancy and failover across data centers or cloud availability zones.
Learn about three key load-balancing techniques for DDoS Mitigation and Web Application Firewall.
2. Use a Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Web applications are the front door to your online presence. Web application firewalls (WAFs) are checkpoints that sit in front of a web application and scrutinize every request. A WAF filters and monitors HTTP traffic between the web application and the internet and blocks harmful requests, helping to defend against bots and malicious traffic.
3. Implement Rate Limiting
Rate controls limit the requests a single source IP address or user can make within a specific period of time. They can be applied to the network, application, and API levels. While using rate control limits can help protect against bot traffic, they can also affect legitimate users, and businesses should test rate limit configurations before implementing them.
4. Use a DDoS Mitigation Service
Not all online traffic spikes are DDoS attacks, but all DDoS attacks involve flooding a website with unwanted traffic. A DDoS mitigation solution will inspect incoming traffic and separate legitimate users from malicious bots. Service providers that leverage scrubbing centers can analyze network packets to block harmful requests before they even reach your website.
Vercara: Robust Support for Handling Traffic Spikes
A sudden influx of new traffic can be exhilarating. Did a piece of content finally go viral, or was the latest marketing campaign a success? Whatever the reason, spikes in traffic don’t have to spell performance issues for your website.
With over 25 years of proven experience, Vercara offers multiple options for businesses looking to take a proactive approach to traffic management. UltraWAF offers robust protection from bots and other web-application layer threats, while UltraDDoS provides resilient DDoS protection.
