Don’t Blow Out Your Performance Budget on Bot Security

Do you remember the last time you waited more than three seconds for a web page to load? What about two? Performance and latency are measured in milliseconds—but we still notice when it’s bad. On average, most retail and travel website users will give a page at most three seconds to load before moving on.

While bot mitigation tools often add latency, you cannot just do without. The billions of malicious bot requests spread across the web would significantly slow down your website and negatively impact your user experience and your security. You need to minimize latency—without sacrificing your website’s security against cyberfraud.

Who cares about latency?

Chances are, some people in your organization are very concerned about site latency because every second of latency slashes potential revenue.

SEO

Latency impacts your site’s web metrics, which in turn impact your SEO and search engine rankings. SEO is key to getting your website’s content in front of potential customers’ eyes without paying for ads—so every (milli)second counts. Bot traffic adds a lot of strain to your servers, slowing your website down, so SEO efforts must include bot mitigation to be truly effective.

UX

Your customers don’t want to wait or struggle to navigate your site. High latency adds a delay to every single click made by the end-user on your website, leading to frustration, lower engagement, and lost business opportunities. Your brand reputation may even suffer if the problems persist, as customers know they can expect a difficult user experience on your site.

Conversion Rate

From Google’s research, we know traffic drops off precipitously when even an extra half second is added to search result generation times. If there are two websites selling the same product or service, but one loads significantly slower than the other, customers are likely to go to the faster site—even if the prices might be higher. Every added bit of latency is a potential decrease in your conversion rate, and therefore a decrease in your revenue.

Why does my bot protection tool’s latency matter?

Google measures your page performance with Core Web Vitals (CWVs), allowing its search algorithms to get an idea of your end-user UX—and it uses these metrics in determining Google search rankings. Therefore, if your bot protection tool adds significant latency (in milliseconds), your CWVs will be impacted. And lower SEO means diminished UX, which all leads to dead conversions.

What impacts your bot protection tool’s latency?

While it’s usually easy to improve your own server response time, your bot protection tool usually has its own servers and needs to communicate with your back-end to implement blocking decisions.

PoPs

If you’re a worldwide company, chances are traffic will be coming to your website from all over the world. If your bot protection tool doesn’t have enough distributed points of presence (PoPs) around the globe, requests from potential customers will have to travel farther for verification. This can add significant latency to every request. Multiply that by the millions, and you have a good picture of how much poor latency could impact your customers and your business.

One other piece to consider is load management. A bot protection tool is likely to run into issues with massive waves of bot traffic and DDoS attacks. Are its PoPs built with load distribution in mind? The only thing worse than website latency is website downtime, and your security tool shouldn’t cause either.

Client Size & Complexity

Bot mitigation often involves a client-side component to collect signals using JavaScript. Many vendors put “intelligence” in it, which can decrease performance as well as detection accuracy, because the intelligence is only updated periodically (versus in real time). How large is the client in JS, and does it add extra latency to each web page on its own? Lightweight clients are more likely to save your performance and your accuracy.

Speed

The speed of your bot mitigation tool plays a part as well, combined with PoPs and the client size. Basically, how fast is it? Tools that take more than a few milliseconds to make a decision on each request add latency to your website that end users will notice. However, bot mitigation tools should also avoid sacrificing accuracy for speed, or vice versa. The best protection will come from a tool that can make an accurate decision within milliseconds in real time.

DataDome: Low-Latency, High-Protection, & Safe Conversions

DataDome was built to provide accurate detection without compromising on security. The Cyberfraud Protection Platform operates at the edge, using our array of PoPs worldwide, to deliver blocking decisions as quickly as possible. With lightweight clients, high-performance infrastructure, and an eye on evolving bot threats, we keep your business safe—without added latency.

Reducing latency improves the performance of your website and your SEO, as search engines prioritize sites that load quickly and efficiently. This will improve your conversion rates, customer satisfaction, and overall brand reputation. Plus, you’ll gain the competitive edge of fully protecting your customers from online threats while offering a fast, secure user experience.

To learn more about how DataDome ensures low-latency, high-standard protection, book a demo with an expert today.