Hi @millionleaves,
Thanks for contacting me here.
Bots are a problem for pretty much every WP site of note. What I find to be most effective is something like a security plugin of the flavor of WordFence or WPBruiser as this traffic often has a specific signature that is easier for them to detect than trying to handling it on each service that’s affected (imagine your form plugin, your ecommerce plugin and a membership plugin on the site all trying to handle the bot problem slightly different and incorrectly…)
Have you tried this yet? In my experience, that’s the most effective way to keep bot traffic at a minimum.
Like most WP plugins, we focus on doing one thing and doing that very well. Since we’re about abandoned cart recovery and email marketing, our goal is to try and capture carts and send emails about recovering that for your store. Bots can clog the system if they are sophisticated enough by creating fake carts, but it’s rare that a bot would create a fake cart AND put a valid email on that as well, so we haven’t needed to address that aspect in our time thus far. In truth, it would be difficult to determine what is a “fake cart” and what is a real one based on the content alone. It’s far better to filter the traffic up front and allow non-bots through which makes all plugins more effective on the site as well.
Another suggestion might be to put your site on Cloudflare, which is free for most of their services. That alone helps reduce malicious traffic significantly.
I hope that helps.
Please let me know if you have any other questions or issues!
