After sending a newsletter many users (and I suspect automated) click the links in the newsletter and nearly crush my website. How can I approach this situation?
What steps have you taken to resolve the issue?
I tried blocking bots in Cloudflare but I’m not sure which ones they are.
I suspect this is automated because all the links, even the boring ones, are being clicked.
Also, I tried sending the newsletter gradually, but it was still the same issue.
May I ask if you’ve got some kind of a caching system implemented?
If you’re domain is using Cloudflare and DNS records are proxied, you can setup cache with few simple clicks.
Are you aslo tracking the clicks on those backlinks? Each is different with some hash?
Might be good as well to alongside the cache implementation at Cloudflare, you’d use redirect all those example.com/something/?tracking=hash to a cached example.com/somnething/ so the Web server wouldn’t have to re-generate each time the same content and use CPU for it. Possibly that’s the thing in your case, or something else.
For testing purposes, you can configure and set Browser Cache TTL and Edge Cache TTL to e.g. 1 day and test out.
You can redirect those “hash” links to clean cached HTML pages with a Page Rule for example, below one is for Facebook links (the same method can be used for your case if you’re tracking the clicks):
