Filtering out bogus requests from Netlify Analytics
I host this site on Netlify, and I pay for Netlify Analytics to monitor its performance. It’s essentially server-side logging with a dashboard on top, and it’s more than sufficient for the very limited analytics I want to do here.
One of the dashboard panels is “resources not found”, which tells me which URLs are 404’ing on the site. For example, I changed a bunch of URLs at the end of last year, and I tried to redirect all the old URLs – this table tells me about anything I missed.
Sometimes this table contains useful data – like the fact that I have two images I didn’t redirect, which still get several hundred hits a month (fixed, fixed). But a lot of the hits are from malicious bots, crawling the web for vulnerable PHP or WordPress installations. Since I don’t run PHP, I’m not worried about them breaking anything; these errors are just noise.
To filter these requests out of the table, I’ve created a bunch of redirects in my _redirects file. I’m matching on a handful of these patterns using wildcards, and sending them all to /400/ with an HTTP 400 status code:
/wp-* /400/ 400
/blog/wp-* /400/ 400
/cms/wp-* /400/ 400
/site/wp-* /400/ 400
/wordpress/wp-* /400/ 400
/wp/wp-* /400/ 400
/wp2/wp-* /400/ 400
/index.php* /400/ 400
(That HTTP 400 error page is also tiny – a mere 23 bytes – to avoid wasting any unnecessary bandwidth on these Internet leeches.)
Because these requests are now getting an HTTP 400 instead of HTTP 404, they stop appearing in the “Top resources not found” table.
Using wildcards keeps this list manageable – with a few lines I can discard the majority of requests, rather than playing a game of whack-a-mole with every PHP URL somebody thinks to try.
It’d be nice if Netlify could do this for me, because this sort of crawling is incredibly common and filtering these requests out would improve this table for a lot of their customers – but in the meantime, a handful of redirects does the trick.