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Extremely high bandwidth usage with XStore Theme

This topic has 2 replies, 2 voices, and was last updated 1 years, 2 months ago ago by Rose Tyler

Antonis

Participant

January 9, 2024 at 12:24

Hi, we need your help please…

I already opened another topic in the past to seek assistance regarding the very slow loading times of all of our XStore installations that we have tried so far. The theme is almost unusable and we have tried LiteSpeed Cache with its own CDN and with Cloudflare CDN as well but nothing seems to work sufficiently yet…

Anyway, this time I am contacting you because I noticed that in November, our eShop used 130GB bandwidth with almost zero traffic from real users (almost all of it was from Googlebot), as it was just a demo in development mode… We locked the domain in the end of November and moved the installation on another domain to host our real eShop that we built in December.

Well, as you can see in the attached photos, the new eShop started getting also very high bandwidth (around 15GB bandwidth at the last 7 days). 10,59GB are from Googlebot (why is this happening???). We also checked Google Analytics that showed 6 users in total at these 7 days!

https://ibb.co/PcW9QwW

We also checked if anything strange is going on with our locked demo installation and we found out that during December we had 511.922 hits which produced 2,44GB bandwidth, with 0 visitors of course (from Google Analytics).

https://ibb.co/dB5KGsS

Any ideas what’s going on here?
Why Googlebot seems to attack your theme?
How can we stop this?
Maybe this has to do with the very slow response times (15-30 seconds to load first page).

Thanks in advance.

#379244 Copied Theme version: 9.2.5 WooCommerce version: 8.4.0

1 Answer

Rose Tyler

Support staff

January 10, 2024 at 12:35

Hello,

Thank you for reaching out to us for assistance. We understand your concerns regarding the slow loading times of your site and the unusually high bandwidth usage attributed to Googlebot activities.

From the details you’ve provided, it seems there are two primary issues at hand: the performance of the site and the excessive bandwidth consumption by Googlebot.

For the performance-related concerns, we recommend the following:
1. https://www.8theme.com/documentation/xstore/troubleshooting/how-to-speed-up-my-website/
2. Optimize images and other static assets to reduce their size and improve load times.
3. Minimize the number of plugins in use and deactivate any that are not essential to your eShop’s functionality.
4. Update XStore and all associated plugins to their latest versions to benefit from any performance improvements.

Regarding the high bandwidth usage by Googlebot, this could be due to several factors, including:
1. Frequent crawling of your website by Googlebot, which might be caused by dynamic content updates or site structure changes.
2. A misconfiguration in your robots.txt file that is allowing Googlebot to access areas of your site that it shouldn’t, leading to unnecessary crawling and indexing.
3. An issue with the sitemap that might be causing Googlebot to crawl the site more often than required.

To address the Googlebot bandwidth issue, we suggest:
1. Reviewing your robots.txt file to ensure it is correctly configured to guide Googlebot’s crawling behavior.
2. Checking your sitemap for any errors or unnecessary URLs that could be prompting excessive crawling.
3. Using Google Search Console to adjust the crawl rate of Googlebot and monitor its activity on your site.

We hope this information is helpful.

Best Regards,
8Theme’s Team

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