WP Toolkit Bot Protection

Overview

The Plesk WP Toolkit is a set of management tools built into Plesk for managing aspects of a WordPress website. This includes aspects such as managing the installation of WordPress, cloning sites, updating themes and plugins, security and more.

One of the security features includes the ability to block a number of bots, from crawling your website. This may be required if there’s excess traffic to your website which is interfering with legitimate users.

Unfortunately, the WP Toolkit option doesn’t allow you to customise the bots blocked. Here’s a list of the major bots currently blocked (as of November 2024):

• acunetix
• BLEXBot
• domaincrawler.com
• LinkpadBot
• MJ12bot
• AhrefsBot
• TwengaBot
• SemrushBot
• Xenu Link Sleuth
• Baiduspider
• python-requests

Some of these bots are legitimate if you have SEO monitoring on your website. We recommend reviewing with your development team before enabling.

Instructions

1. Login into Plesk via the Conetix Control Panel.
2. For the website to add the block for, go into the WP Toolkit:
   
3. Click on the link beside security to bring up the security dialog:
   
4. Tick the Enable bot protection checkbox:
   
5. Then, click on Secure to apply the settings.
6. If the setting is blocking legitimate traffic (eg for your SEO monitoring), it can be disabled again by selecting as per the steps above and choosing Revert.

We also have specific guidance on blocking crawler bots to specific URL’s if there’s areas which cause issues with crawling.