You Can Now Block Country Traffic to Protect your Website

The security of our clients’ websites has always been one of our top priorities and something that we continuously improve on. The latest tool in our website protection arsenal, available for FREE on all hosting plans, is the option to easily block the traffic coming to your site from specific countries. This will not only increase your website security, but can also help website performance by decreasing resource usage when blocking the traffic coming from locations you would rather not get traffic from.

When to consider blocking the traffic from a specific country?

There are different reasons why someone would like to block the traffic from a specific country to their site, but the most common are the following:

• To Stop Malicious Traffic

If you notice abnormally high traffic from a country that your site is not targeting as audience, or you start receiving too many spam comments from such a country on your blog posts, or you identify any other behavior you consider suspicious, coming from a geographic region that’s not your main user target, it may be a wise idea to block the traffic from this location.

• To Streamline Your Business

There are various reasons due to which you might not be willing or able to do business with certain countries. Some examples are expensive and/or complicated deliveries; legal requirements that prevent you from providing your service, heavy taxation requirements, etc. Now, if you need to stop access to your site from a specific country due to such reasons, this can be easily done through your Site Tools.

How does SiteGround country block work?

Adding a country to your Blocked list is easy. You need to go to your Site Tools > Security > Blocked Traffic  > Block Country section:

Once a country is blocked, all visitors coming from an IP address that we identify as being located in this country will start seeing our default Country Block HTML page.

The tool allows you to block multiple countries, and also to block certain countries from accessing your main domain, or specific sub-domains. You can review the list of all countries you have denied access to, and/or add or remove countries from it with a click of a button at any time. 

Our new Country blocking option is also fully compatible with our SiteGround CDN and visitors from blocked countries would not be able to access your website pages whether you have our CDN service activated or not.