Normally a drop in unique visitors would make me frown at the screen and start second-guessing every life choice.

This one made me smile.

Solid line is the last 28 days. Dashed line is the previous period. Those big spikes were mostly bots hammering the contact forms, comments, and registration pages. Once I locked those down, a big chunk of the overall bot traffic just stopped. The flat line underneath is closer to real humans.

The free plugin (reCAPTCHA V3 for Jetpack) scores submissions with Google’s invisible reCAPTCHA v3 and sends the low-score junk to spam before it counts as a visitor. The Pro version adds temporary 72-hour IP bans on top of that.

Result: the stats finally stopped lying to me. I’m proud I built this thing. Sometimes the best traffic report is the one that finally tells the truth.