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Issues with page speed and bandwidth consumption.

This topic has 27 replies, 2 voices, and was last updated 13 hours, 36 minutes ago ago by Razland

Razland

Participant

July 15, 2026 at 20:06

My XStore site was working so well running smoothly but since a couple of days (June 13 to be precise) crawlers from bing and some unknown ones were hitting so heavily my site, specifically urls with no canonical such as brands. Now i search deep in the theme and i realize you guys have changed a lot in the hub from XStore, there just to be buttons to update css and cache from the general settings but that section was completely wiped from this new version. We used to have tabs in the settings and there are no longer none of those. And i also saw the new toggle for “noindexing” just to ask you guys if some how all of these is due to changes in the theme. I have just updated everything and it is working but is so slow to load the site.

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26 Answers

Andrew Mitchell

Support staff

July 16, 2026 at 07:09

Hello, Razland,
Could you please let us know which version of the theme you were using before the update, and also provide us with access to the admin panel and FTP?

Best regards,
8Theme Team

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Razland

Participant

July 16, 2026 at 21:43

Hello in the private area you will find the access for both platforms WP and FTP. I also added a couple of images from AWStats

Please contact administrator
for this information.

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support staff only.

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Andrew Mitchell

Support staff

July 17, 2026 at 07:28

Hello, Razland,

Thank you for providing access. Unfortunately, the link to the admin panel is not working, and the login buttons on your website are missing. Could you please send us the correct link to log in to the admin panel?

In addition, we are unable to connect to the FTP server and receive the following error message:
“Connection timed out after 20 seconds of inactivity.”

Best regards,
8Theme Team

Files is visible for topic creator and
support staff only.

#471946 Copied

Razland

Participant

July 17, 2026 at 19:29

Sorry for not sending the link to access to the WordPress Admin. In the private area is the custom link. I am trying to figure it out whats is happening with the FTP Access, i am contacting my hosting provider to seewhat is happening.

Just a side note right now the site is with an 429 error to many petitions and all this is happening since i updated the theme i do not know if it is related.

Please contact administrator
for this information.

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Razland

Participant

July 18, 2026 at 01:26

Can you please try with these credentials?

Please contact administrator
for this information.

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Andrew Mitchell

Support staff

July 20, 2026 at 08:04

Hello, Razland,

Thank you for providing access to the admin panel. We have adjusted the XStore options under the “Speed Optimization” settings. The theme should now operate more stably, although there may be a temporary increase in load as the caches are being regenerated.

Unfortunately, the FTP access is still not functioning.

Best regards,
8Theme Team

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Razland

Participant

July 20, 2026 at 15:59

What about the excess of crawler bots on the page. OK Could work if u granted you with access to the CPanel?

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Andrew Mitchell

Support staff

July 21, 2026 at 06:51

Hello, Razland,

Regarding the large number of bots, this issue is not related to the theme itself. We recommend using one of the available anti-bot plugins, such as Wordfence, or even implementing Cloudflare for maximum bots protection

Best regards,
8Theme Team

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Razland

Participant

July 22, 2026 at 01:06

Well i just can say that from the moment i updated the theme the problem presented itself. as you can see in on of the images, from an stable 2 -3 gb consumption it jumped to 18-19GB. But well i am just connecting dots. Thank you anyway.

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Andrew Mitchell

Support staff

July 22, 2026 at 14:36

Hello Rozland,

I understand your concern. From our side, the theme itself does not generate crawler or bot traffic. However, after an update, certain files, cache, or page URLs may change, which can sometimes cause search engines or other bots to crawl the site more actively for a short period.

To determine exactly what happened, we need to review the server access logs to identify which bots, IP addresses, or user agents used the bandwidth. If possible, please provide temporary access to your cPanel or hosting panel, or ask your hosting provider to send the access logs for the period before and after the update.

We will then check whether any theme-related files or URLs are being requested unusually often.

In the meantime, we recommend enabling Cloudflare or another CDN/firewall solution, as this is usually the most effective way to manage aggressive bot traffic and reduce bandwidth usage.

Best regards,
8Theme Team

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Razland

Participant

July 27, 2026 at 17:29

Thank you i will share the acceso to the CPANEL. The site is still so slow. Now i like to really point some issues here. The site was working really great, but, my error log is constantly capturing errors around Elementor, and XStore amp, you can see all those in the error log, now you will see two error logs one of them is huge (around 600mb) i analyzed with AI one specific error with a lot o serialize data in it, this error caused a Data base shutdown and it seems related with the XStore brand filter feature. Now i mention the crawl situation because the most visited page is muebleriasdelportal.com/brands/lg and a lot of combinations around this. And it all started around July 13th, i can confirm if that day is when we updated the theme, but around that day is when we actually updated the theme, we did not do anything on the web site and the crawl bot started to flood that specific address. We installed Cloudflare and we manage to stop the flood in to that specific url, but the crawls are still flooding the website. We have other site hosted on the same hosting account and only this one is having that problem.

Please contact administrator
for this information.

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Razland

Participant

July 27, 2026 at 17:36

I leave the analysis made with AI. This error presented on July 24th, and also i have lots of errors from elementor, and not just on recent dates but from weeks or even months.

Please contact administrator
for this information.

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Andrew Mitchell

Support staff

July 28, 2026 at 07:45

Hello, Razland,

The size of this transient depends on the number of filters, and it functions in the same way as any other WooCommerce transient. Without using the transient, the page would take even longer to load, as all this data would be retrieved from the database in real-time. Currently, using the transient as a cache for these values is the best solution

Best Regards,
8Theme’s Team

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Razland

Participant

July 28, 2026 at 16:30

Ok but is is normal to create an error that increase my Error log to almost 640MB? I guess you are still in progress of checking my backend

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Razland

Participant

July 28, 2026 at 22:37

Quick update. The site keeps getting a huge error log i entered in the site today and the error log is a 1.3 GB file size. i am downloading the file to se what is doing that.

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Andrew Mitchell

Support staff

July 29, 2026 at 08:10

Hello, Razland,

Please send us the link to the error log. Additionally, indicate whether you have added any AI-generated code to the theme files, child theme, or elsewhere, and whether you have granted AI assistants access to the theme files

Best regards,
8Theme’s Team

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Razland

Participant

July 29, 2026 at 15:57

I gave you access to the whole Cpanel. inside the file manger you can seee the error log, but right now i erase the logs since they are 1.6 GB. but if you wait for tomorrow or even a little bit late on the day you will see the error log. Now i have not given any access or installed any code generated by AI i am only using the AI as an assitant, describing and presenting the info and following its recommendations. What kind of recommendations, installling Cloud Flare and using some features from it, But i guarantee you guys i have not installed any code or gave any access to the AI.

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Andrew Mitchell

Support staff

July 30, 2026 at 08:32

Hello, Razland,

Unfortunately, we are unable to connect to your panel

Best regards,
8Theme’s Team

Files is visible for topic creator and
support staff only.

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Razland

Participant

July 30, 2026 at 19:57

I am sorry guys probably a finger slip made me erase a couple of letters in the URL address. Sorry about that. The credentials are ok now. And you can access.

Now i have another update for you guys. Doing further research i found the following Data

I know the transients are much needed but for some reason this is happening:
• _transient_wc_layered_nav_counts_brand creates a big size error while trying to create transients, and is related with Brands.
• This clue led us to the fact that we created to sets of brands in the site: XStore Brands and Woocommerce brands. We thought would be beneficial for the SEO since there were two sets of brands that can be found, but it was de opposite, now we created this two sets of brand while creating our store, and everything worked well until this month that everything went down. Now we can say that the bots flooding were because of this but we suspect is of a high possibility.
• the site since the update was too damn slow and not just on the front end but also on the dashboard from WordPress. And i can say this really happened when we updated the theme.

Now after hours of researching we thought about the brands, since the transient that is growing so much and also is creating a big ass error, yesterday we tried disabling the XStores brand setting and boom the site right now is running real nice, and we just disable that. I have to say that maybe we did not read in your documents if it is not recommended to enable brands on both systems but now i can say it really causes a major problem issue with the site performance, at least with our site. We are keeping an eye on the transients, the error log and the site performance for the next 72 hours just to see if everything is ok now. And also checking if this also related with the bots flooding our site, because at the beginning of the problem the terms most visited were a brand page.

Now i would asked you guys to still check everything in the CPANEL, i am not versed in coding or scripting or whatever. Like i said i am using AI as an assistant and all my research is using this tools to trying to unveil the reason of all the issues with my site.

Please contact administrator
for this information.

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Andrew Mitchell

Support staff

July 31, 2026 at 06:32

Hello, Razland,

We are still unable to connect to your cPanel. Please check if there is a whitelist, blacklist, or any other restrictions in place.

Best regards,
8Theme’s Team

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Razland

Participant

August 9, 2026 at 19:13

I connected with the credentials i gave you. don not use a FTP app. Just open a browser and paste the URL address, it will load a sign in page and use the credentials i sent. i’ve done that in two different laptops and in two different browsers Safari and Chrome with successful log in in both equips and browsers.

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Andrew Mitchell

Support staff

August 10, 2026 at 08:25

Hello, Razland,

Greetings, even through the browser we are encountering the following error:

This site can't be reached. The server IP address for mco28.prodns could not be found.

Best regards,
8Theme’s Team

Files is visible for topic creator and
support staff only.

#472939 Copied

Razland

Participant

August 13, 2026 at 15:16

This is weir. I recorded a video login in how can i share this with you guys. I logged in different computers even on a cellphone and the result is the same. I can login without issues. I’ve created a FTP and you can access either.

#473327 Copied

Razland

Participant

August 14, 2026 at 04:58

Hello XStore Support Team,

I would like to request a technical investigation regarding a significant change in crawling behavior that started shortly after updating our website to XStore 9.7.6 / XStore Core 5.7.6, released on July 10, 2026.

Before this update, our WooCommerce website had relatively stable bandwidth consumption of approximately 2.5–3.9 GB per day.

We updated XStore around July 13, and shortly afterwards we began observing a dramatic increase in automated crawling activity and bandwidth consumption.

The traffic is not limited to normal product or category URLs. Bots are systematically requesting a very large number of dynamically generated WooCommerce shop URLs containing combinations of parameters such as:

filter_cat
filter_brand
min_price
max_price
stock_status
et_columns-count
view_mode
view_mode_smart
sale_status

For example, our Raw Access Logs show bots generating large numbers of different combinations of these parameters against /tienda/ within very short periods of time.

The most significant crawler we have identified is Meta’s meta-webindexer, although Bing, Google and other crawlers are also contributing to the traffic.

I want to make an important distinction: we are not claiming that XStore is generating these bots. We understand that the bots themselves are external actors.

Our concern is different.

We would like to determine whether changes introduced in XStore 9.7.6 could have modified the way WooCommerce product category/filter URLs are generated, exposed, linked, canonicalized, or otherwise made discoverable to crawlers, thereby substantially increasing the number of crawlable URL combinations.

The temporal correlation is strong enough that we believe the update warrants investigation.

This is particularly relevant because the 9.7.6 changelog includes several changes directly related to product categories and filtering:

FIXED: Product Categories Filter widget
DEV: Added etheme_cat_filter_base_url filter to customize the Product Categories Filter base URL
FIXED: Empty product category archives when detached variations are enabled

These changes caught our attention because the majority of the automated traffic we are currently seeing is concentrated precisely on dynamically filtered shop/category URLs.

We would therefore appreciate a technical review of the following:

Did XStore 9.7.6 introduce changes to the Product Categories Filter, filter URL generation, query-string handling, canonical URLs, internal links, AJAX filtering, or crawler/indexation behavior that could expose additional filter combinations to search engines or automated crawlers?
Could the new etheme_cat_filter_base_url functionality or the changes to the Product Categories Filter widget result in a larger number of unique crawlable URLs?
Is there any known interaction between XStore 9.7.6, WooCommerce layered/product filters and aggressive crawlers that could result in combinatorial crawling of filter parameters?
Could XStore currently be generating internal links, alternate URLs, canonical references, AJAX requests, or other signals that allow crawlers to discover large numbers of filter combinations?
Were there any changes between the previous XStore version and 9.7.6 affecting the way filter combinations are exposed or discovered by crawlers?

There is also an important historical reason why we believe this deserves investigation.

We have found previous XStore support cases where excessive bot crawling of dynamic shop/filter URLs was associated with very large numbers of requests and significant server resource consumption. We also found discussions involving XStore functionality generating substantial AJAX activity and situations where dynamic shop URLs could create a very large number of crawlable combinations.

Our current situation is consistent with that type of behavior.

Our hosting provider has now confirmed that the account has repeatedly reached CloudLinux resource limits, including significant numbers of Process Count Limit events and LVE resource-limit events. These events coincide with periods of very high request concurrency.

When the traffic becomes sufficiently aggressive, the website begins returning HTTP 429 Too Many Requests responses. This affects not only bots but also normal visitors and WordPress administration.

We have already implemented Cloudflare bot protection and rate limiting to mitigate the traffic. Interestingly, the Cloudflare rate-limiting rule is now detecting thousands of requests exceeding our defined threshold, which confirms that the automated traffic is occurring at a very high rate.

Again, we are not asking XStore to take responsibility for the bots themselves.

What we are trying to determine is whether a change introduced in XStore 9.7.6 may have expanded the crawlable surface of our WooCommerce catalog or changed how filter combinations are exposed/discoverable, potentially allowing crawlers to generate an enormous number of requests that were not occurring at this scale before the update.

We would therefore appreciate having this reviewed by someone from the XStore development team, rather than treating it solely as a generic hosting or bot-traffic issue.

If there are known changes in 9.7.6 related to filtering, URL generation, AJAX filtering, canonicalization, or crawler discoverability that could explain this behavior, we would appreciate any technical details you can provide.

Thank you for your assistance.

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Andrew Mitchell

Support staff

August 14, 2026 at 17:36

Hello, Razland,

We would like to clarify this point once again because two different things are being mixed together here.

The changes made to the XStore product filters affect how the filters work for visitors on the frontend. They do not control how third-party bots or crawlers scan your website, which URLs they request, how frequently they request them, or how much bandwidth those requests consume.

A crawler does not interact with the shop in the same way as a normal visitor using the filters. If a bot continues requesting filtered, parameterized, or other URLs, changing the filter behavior in the theme will not prevent those requests.

Therefore, if the reported bandwidth consumption is caused by crawler requests, this needs to be handled at the server/crawler level, for example through crawler settings, robots.txt rules, Cloudflare/firewall rules, rate limiting, or other hosting-side measures. Your server access logs can be used to identify exactly which bots and URLs are responsible for the traffic.

This is outside the scope of the XStore theme because the theme cannot control which URLs an external crawler decides to request from your server.

If you believe XStore itself is generating an abnormal number of requests, please provide a specific reproducible example showing the requests generated by the theme during a normal frontend session. We will gladly investigate that separately.

Best Regards,
8Theme’s Team

#473475 Copied

Razland

Participant

August 14, 2026 at 20:45

Hello,

Thank you for the clarification. We understand the distinction you are making, and we agree that XStore does not control how an external crawler decides which URLs to request or how frequently it crawls the website.

Our concern is slightly different, and we would like to clarify our hypothesis so that we can determine whether there is any possible relationship with the changes introduced in XStore 9.7.6.

We are not suggesting that XStore is generating the bot traffic directly. Rather, we are investigating whether changes to the product filtering system, URL generation, filter combinations, or the way filter parameters are exposed could have increased the number of crawlable/parameterized URLs available to external crawlers.

Since the July 10, 2026 update, we have observed a very significant change in crawler behavior. Prior to the update, our website had relatively stable bandwidth consumption of approximately 2.5–3.9 GB per day. Shortly after the update, we began observing massive crawler activity, particularly requests to /tienda/ containing numerous combinations of filter_cat, filter_brand, price ranges, stock status, column settings, view modes, and other parameters.

For example, our access logs now contain large numbers of requests such as:

/tienda/?min_price=…&max_price=…&filter_brand=…&filter_cat=…&stock_status=…

with constantly changing combinations.

We fully understand that an external crawler is ultimately responsible for deciding to request these URLs. However, our question is whether the changes introduced in 9.7.6 could have changed the discoverability, generation, canonicalization, URL structure, or available combinations of these product filters, thereby creating a substantially larger URL surface for crawlers to explore.

This is particularly relevant because the 9.7.6 changelog includes several changes directly related to product categories and filtering, including:

FIXED: Product Categories Filter widget
DEV: Added etheme_cat_filter_base_url filter to customize the Product Categories Filter base URL
FIXED: Empty product category archives when detached variations are enabled

We are not claiming that these changes caused the crawler traffic. We are asking whether any of these changes could have unintentionally altered the way filter URLs are exposed or generated in a way that makes them more attractive or discoverable to crawlers.

We have already taken several server-side measures to reduce the impact of the traffic. We have also identified that the main crawler involved is Meta’s meta-webindexer, although it is not the only crawler involved. We are seeing Bing, Google, Apple-related traffic, Jetpack, and other crawlers as well.

Our current working hypothesis is therefore:

XStore may not be generating the bot requests itself, but a change in the filter/URL architecture could potentially have increased the number of parameterized URLs that crawlers can discover and request.

If possible, we would appreciate your technical feedback on whether the changes in 9.7.6 could have affected:

The number of filter URL combinations exposed to crawlers.
The way product category/filter URLs are generated.
The etheme_cat_filter_base_url behavior.
Internal links or other mechanisms that could expose parameterized filter URLs.
Canonical URLs or noindex behavior for filtered product archives.
Any known issue in 9.7.6 that could result in an unusually large number of filter combinations being crawlable.

We are currently collecting additional evidence from the server access logs and Cloudflare, and we are also monitoring the HTTP response headers when a 429 occurs so that we can identify which infrastructure layer is actually returning the response.

We are not asking you to take responsibility for the crawler traffic itself. We simply want to determine whether anything introduced or modified in the 9.7.6 filtering system could have increased the crawlable URL surface and therefore contributed to the dramatic change in crawler activity observed immediately after the update.

The temporal correlation is strong enough that we believe the update warrants investigation.

If you can point us toward any specific behavior in the 9.7.6 filter implementation that could explain the creation or exposure of these large numbers of parameterized URLs, that would be extremely helpful.

Thank you for your assistance.

Best regards,

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