How to save requests?
We do our best to offer the best rates in the market and at the same time we code our plugins having in mind how we can make you save requests. That's why it's important for you to understand a some things:
- Cache mode: Will not be always the best solution for you unless you are using geolocation site wide. You can read more in Cache mode docs page
- Bots & Crawlers: We do use the Crawler detect library to detect bots and crawlers and exclude them from the request. The problem is that malicious bots don't identify as such and we can't do anything about them. We do recommend using a service like Cloudflare or Sucuri which filters lots of malicious requests before they hit your servers.
- Google Analytics: Google analytics are not 100% accurate. If you want to view the exact page views of your site, again you need to user a service that filter all request like Cloudflare or check server access logs.
The excessive usage of requests could be due to multiple factors.
But first, let me clarify that requests are consumed every time the plugin makes a call to the API. If you are geotargeting users from one country it doesn't mean that only users from that country will count as requests.
The plugin needs to know the location of the user in order to perform the geotarget functions., so it sends the IP address to the server and the server responds with the location. That will consume one request.
Malicious bots and crawlers will do consume requests. We do our best to prevent crawlers but we can't detect malicious ones and they will spend requests. We always recommend using a service like Cloudflare that will always tell you the exact traffic (google analytics is not accurate for that) and also will filter a lot of malicious traffic from your site.
Wordfence is another great plugin that will block lot of malicious traffic in your site.
That being said, requests can be saved in multiple ways and all of them are specified in the docs. But here you can find some reminders:
- If you use geotargeting site-wide or every page of your site you need to enable cache mode
- If you are only using on a couple of pages, you need to disable cache mode
- If you are using redirects on certain pages, geo rules should be placed at the bottom
- Debug mode should be turned off on production
If you have doubts about your current settings simple write to support and we will be able to tell if you have your settings optimized to save requests.