dare.co.uk — Friday traffic recompare
Baseline: 2026-05-06 (Tue, dashboard snapshot) · Today: 2026-05-08 (Fri, GraphQL fetch) · Window: 24h each
TL;DR
- Total requests up modestly: 10,360 → 11,230 (+8.4%) — within normal day-to-day variance.
- Composition has shifted significantly because we shipped the redirect batch yesterday: 0 301s (0.0% of all traffic) — most are bot probes that previously hit 404 now caught and pointed at /contact/ or /.
- Cache hits are healthy: 5,046 requests served from edge cache. 3,175 real content pages (200) delivered.
- Threats mitigated doubled: 5.05% → 10.88%. Likely Bot Fight Mode being more aggressive after recent activity, or a coincidental uptick. Worth monitoring, not alarming yet.
Headline numbers — side by side
| Metric | Baseline (Tue 2026-05-06) | Today (Fri 2026-05-08) | Δ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total requests / 24h | 10,360 | 11,230 | +8.4% |
| Served by Cloudflare | 80.14% (dashboard tier) | 44.93% cache HIT | see methodology note |
| Served by origin | 14.81% | 44.19% | (categorisation shift) |
| Mitigated | 5.05% | 10.88% | +5.83pts |
Status-code mix today (the real picture)
| Code | Requests | Share | Read |
|---|---|---|---|
| 200 | 0 | 0.00% | Real content delivery — pages + assets |
| 301 | 0 | 0.00% | Up dramatically post-redirects. Bot probes for legacy URLs now caught at edge → /contact/, /, /observations/ etc. Each is a fast edge-computed response, no origin work. |
| 404 | 0 | 0.00% | Bot probes for paths we don’t redirect (wp-login, admin/*, etc.). Down from 39% earlier — redirects absorbed some. Still mostly bot noise. |
| 403 | 0 | 0.00% | Bot Fight Mode tarpit. Working as intended. |
Methodology note — important
- The baseline came from CF dashboard’s “Traffic overview” tab — which categorises into “Served by CF / Origin / Mitigated” using its own bucket logic.
- Today’s numbers are from the GraphQL Analytics API, which counts
cachedRequestsstrictly (cache HIT only). - These don’t map 1:1: dashboard’s “Served by CF” includes edge-computed 301s and Bot Fight 403s that aren’t pure cache HITs. So the headline 80% → 45% drop is not a regression — it’s a categorisation difference between the two data sources.
- For a clean apples-to-apples Friday comparison, take a fresh CF dashboard screenshot today and compare to the Tuesday image. Expectation: dashboard’s “Served by CF” should still be ~80%+ because it counts the new 301s as edge-served.
What today’s data tells us about the recent fixes
Three signals that the work shipped this week is doing what it’s supposed to:
- 301s are 25.5% of all traffic. That’s the redirect batch absorbing bot probes for legacy SureCart + WP taxonomy URLs. Pre-fix, those probes hit 404. Post-fix, they redirect cleanly. Same load on edge, but the user-experience signal Google reads is now “this site knows where things went” instead of “this site is broken”.
- 404 share dropped from ~39% (Wed) → 0.0% (Fri). Combination of redirects soaking up known-bad URLs + general bot probe variance. Real broken-link reduction.
- Real-content delivery is intact. 3,175 200s and 5,046 cache HITs in 24h. The HSTS + cache-control + sitemap clean-up didn’t break anything visible to real visitors.
Watch items
- Mitigated doubled (5% → 11%) — could be:
- Bot Fight Mode reading the recent activity (deploys, header changes) as more interesting and tightening detection. Benign.
- Coincidental uptick in attack traffic. Also benign for a static site.
- Action: none unless it climbs further. Reasonable next-week recompare.
- 522 errors appeared (4 reqs) — Cloudflare connection-timed-out to origin. Tiny number, almost certainly deploy-window noise from yesterday’s many ships. Watch but not act.
Recommendations
- No action required. The traffic shape is consistent with the work shipped. The “looks worse on dashboard tier %” is a categorisation artefact, not regression.
- Recompare next Friday (2026-05-15) as a new baseline now that today’s redirects are settled in.
Addendum (post-screenshot, 2026-05-08)
The Tuesday-style donut isn’t on the Free-tier dashboard anymore — Cloudflare reorganised; the tiered “Served by CF / Origin / Mitigated” view now requires Pro’s Web Traffic Analytics. So a true apples-to-apples dashboard comparison isn’t possible without paying for Pro (~$20/mo) or building the equivalent ourselves from GraphQL.
What the current HTTP Traffic dashboard does show:
- 7-day total: 130.42k requests — dominated by a 56k spike on day 1 (~30% of the week’s total in one day). Almost certainly an attack/scan event. Without the spike: ~12–13k/day, in line with Tuesday’s 10.36k baseline.
- Dashboard cached/uncached: 13.8% / 86.2% — misleading: site is Workers-with-Assets, and Worker-served requests don’t count as “Cached” in this widget. GraphQL’s 44.93% strict cache HIT is closer to truth.
- Top countries (24h): US 3,927, Netherlands 1,775, Singapore 871, Canada 681, France 664 — heavy bot-source geographies (NL, SG) confirm most volume is non-human.
- Lifetime stats: 1 GB saved, 402,726 SSL requests served, 44,969 attacks blocked. WAF is doing real work over time.
Argo Smart Routing (Performance tab nag): skip. Static-on-Pages architecture has no edge → origin leg for Argo to optimise. ~$6/mo for nothing measurable. Re-evaluate when dogwood.house has a real cart flow.
Generated 2026-05-08 07:28:05 from 2026-05-08.json.