: Spam Traffic, large page view increase but normal amount of visitors - doesn't appear to be referral spam For the last two days I have been getting above average traffic on my website. Most

Posted in: #Analytics #HighTraffic #Spam

For the last two days I have been getting above average traffic on my website.
Most of these visitors have an average duration of under 15 seconds.
While there are not that many more visitors than usual (see Aw Stats screenshot below), there are way more page views and hits.

I'm running Wordpress and have Jetpack stats installed, these high numbers are showing up as page views and are not bots (apparently).

I looked for referral spam but don't see anything unsual. Most of the traffic for page views and full referrer in Google Analytics shows up as 'direct' followed by the usual Google Facebook etc. The majority of the bandwidth is being used by accessing javascript files. When I look at server logs most of these js files are just normal files (ie. it's not one specific js file or exclusively custom js files, lots of vendor js files in there).

I use Cloudfront as the CDN (I only host images here though) but I'm not seeing a huge increase in http requests from Amazon - which is weird considering the high page views.

I am considering using CloudFlare but I'm also wondering if anyone can give me possible ideas of what could be causing the traffic spike? Perhaps this is referral spam I'm not recognising or maybe a targeted attack?

Here is a screeshot from Aw Stats of the traffic spike (1, 2 November are normal traffic days):

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