Overview
The Events Calendar (and The Events Calendar Pro) are popular WordPress plugins to provide event and calendar information within your WordPress website.
However, this can add hundreds to thousands of extra pages to your website. Bots and crawlers (eg, Google) will then all index these extra pages and contribute to increased server load or even cause your website to stop responding.
Further to this, the more events which are added then the larger the problem gets. To mitigate this, you can simply block bots from crawling all of the additional pages (while still covering the key pages).
Instructions
- Always ensure your plugins are up-to-date. If you haven’t updated to the latest available version, this should be the first step. The plugin developer is working on better fixes for some of these issues so ensuring you have the latest version (including the paid version if applicable) is the best possible fix.
- If updates haven’t resolved the issue, the next step is to ensure that your robots.txt requests the bots and crawlers not to crawl parts of your website. You can add the following to your robots.txt to request the pages not be crawled:
## For Events Calendar
Disallow: *post_type=tribe_events*
Disallow: *hide_subsequent_recurrences=*
Disallow: *tribe-bar-date=*
Disallow: *tribe-venue=*
Disallow: *eventDisplay=*
Disallow: *eventDate=*
Disallow: *paged=*
Disallow: *pagename=*
Disallow: *shortcode=*
Disallow: *ical=*
Disallow: *outlook-ical=*
Disallow: *related_series=*
Disallow: *tribe_geofence=*
Disallow: *tribe_organizer=*
If you’re using an SEO plugin such as Yoast of RankMath, you may need to add these into the plugin rather than directly into the file. - However, the robots.txt file is only a suggestion and does not explicitly block bots from accessing these pages. Bots which don’t follow standards or simply choose to ignore them may crawl anyway and still cause issues. We can block these by adding the following to your .htaccess file:
# Block bots and crawlers to unnecessary event components
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Bot|Crawler|Spider) [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (ical|tribe-bar-date|tribe_events|eventDisplay) [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L] - If any of the above is unclear or you’re unsure on how to implement, you may wish to talk to your developer to see if they can assist. Conetix customers on Managed WordPress plans can have these mitigations automatically added.