What’s new in Client Connect: website security, health analytics and three features out of beta

It’s been a busy week on Client Connect. There’s a brand new Website Security area, proper charts behind Site Health, three features graduating out of beta, and a handful of fixes to things that weren’t behaving themselves.

New: Website Security

The biggest addition this week is a new Website Security page, which brings the settings that protect your website into Client Connect so you don’t need to go digging through a separate dashboard.

Everything is written in plain English rather than technical jargon, and the settings we’d recommend are marked with a green badge — so you can see at a glance whether your site is set up the way it should be. Where a setting carries a trade-off, we say so on the page rather than letting you find out afterwards.

You can now control:

• Encryption — how traffic between your visitors and your website is secured, including forcing every visitor onto a secure connection.
• Firewall and bots — how aggressively suspicious visitors are challenged before they reach your site.
• Content protection — hiding email addresses from scrapers, and stopping other websites embedding your images.

Blocking AI crawlers

One we’ve been asked about a lot: you can now stop AI companies scraping your website to train their models. A single switch blocks the major AI crawlers — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Bytespider and others.

Importantly, this doesn’t affect search engines. Google and Bing crawl your site exactly as before, so your search rankings are unchanged. It only stops the crawlers whose purpose is harvesting content for AI training.

“I’m under attack”

If your website ever comes under attack, there’s now a single red button that switches on Cloudflare’s strongest protection immediately. Every visitor is shown a brief challenge page before they reach your site, which stops the attack traffic getting through.

It’s deliberately hard to miss, and equally hard to leave on by accident — while it’s active, a banner across the top of the page reminds you it’s slowing down genuine visitors and prompts you to turn it off once the attack has ended.

Seeing what’s been blocked

The page shows how many threats have been stopped over the last seven days, where in the world they came from, and which protection actually did the work. If a particular country is sending you nothing but trouble, you can block it in one click straight from that list.

Blocking a whole country is a blunt instrument — genuine customers there won’t be able to reach you either — so we ask you to confirm before it takes effect, and it can be undone at any time.

Clearing cached pages

If you’ve updated a page and still see the old version, you can now clear the cached copy yourself. Paste in the addresses you want refreshed, one per line, and they’ll be fetched fresh next time someone visits.

A plain-English security review

Finally, there’s a Review my security button that reads your website’s current configuration and explains it in plain English — what’s set up well, what’s worth changing, and why it matters. It’s there to translate the settings into something you can act on without needing to be technical.

New: Site Health Analytics

Site Health has been quietly monitoring websites for a while. This week it gained a proper analytics view, so you can see the history rather than just the current state.

Each monitored website now has its own analytics page showing uptime percentage, average response time, and a day-by-day breakdown over 7, 30 or 90 days. Response times are charted over time, so you can spot a site gradually getting slower long before it becomes a problem your visitors notice.

Out of beta

Three features have earned their stripes and lost their BETA badges this week:

• Site Health — uptime, SSL and domain expiry monitoring.
• QR Code Tracking — trackable QR codes with editable destinations and scan analytics.
• Support Usage — your monthly support time, broken down by case.

Fixes

A few things weren’t working as they should, and now are:

• Notifications now dismiss properly. Clicking a notification marked it as read in appearance only — it would reappear moments later. Notifications now clear when you click them, and there’s a dismiss button on each one.
• Renewal reminders now appear. A fault meant upcoming service renewals were never reaching the notification bell. If you have services renewing in the next fortnight, you’ll now be told.
• Site Health refresh. Refreshing a website’s health card could silently do nothing. It now updates properly, and tells you what went wrong when it can’t.
• Domain expiry dates were being recorded once and then never refreshed. They’re now rechecked daily.
• The activity log gained icons and colours for several kinds of activity that were previously showing as generic entries, plus a new filter for security changes.

Questions?

If anything here would be useful for your website and you’re not sure whether it’s switched on for you, open a support case and we’ll take a look.