Matt_flexmlsIDX

Hi Tom,
I believe you also sent an email to our IDX support team. But I’ll also include my response here:

Thanks for reaching out, and sorry to hear the traffic spike has been so disruptive for helenmullanyrealestate.com.

Where the load is coming from

Every IDX page request (search results, listing details, etc.) hits your WordPress server. Each request runs PHP, may call our API (or use cache), and your server sends the HTML. So when you see “dozens of hits per minute from dozens of IPs,” that’s your server handling each of those page requests — that’s what drives the extra CPU, memory, and bandwidth and can bring the site down.

Why Facebook/Meta bots might be hitting you

We don’t control why Meta’s crawlers visit specific sites; they crawl for things like link previews, content discovery, and other products. There isn’t a setting in the plugin that can stop or throttle those bots — that has to be done at the server or firewall level.

What the plugin can do (and what we just added)

The plugin doesn’t include its own rate limiting or bot blocking. Mitigation is done with your WAF, host, or security layer (e.g. Mod Security, Cloudflare, or your host’s “Under Attack” / bot management).

We’ve just released version 3.16, which sends a response header on IDX pages so you can target that traffic in your firewall without affecting the rest of your site. That makes it easier to:

• Rate limit or block/challenge traffic to your IDX paths (e.g. /idx/ or whatever you use as the permalink base in Flexmls IDX → Settings → Behavior).
• Allowlist verified search engine crawlers (e.g. Googlebot, Bingbot) for those same paths so your listings stay indexable while you lock down bad or heavy bot traffic.

We published a guide that walks through this and gives WAF examples (including Cloudflare and generic host/nginx guidance):

WAF and SEO: Allowlisting Crawlers on IDX Pages

Practical next steps

1. Update to 3.16 (if you haven’t already) so the new header is sent on IDX pages.
2. Use your existing tools (Mod Security, host firewall, or Cloudflare if you use it) to:
   • Rate limit or challenge requests to your IDX path (e.g. /idx/), and/or
   • Block or tightly limit known Facebook/Meta crawler user-agents or IPs on that path, if your WAF supports it.
3. Follow the new doc to allowlist verified search engine bots on your IDX path so your SEO doesn’t suffer when you tighten the rules.

robots.txt can discourage crawlers but isn’t always respected by every bot; combining it with WAF rules (and the new header so you can scope rules to IDX) is the more reliable approach.

I hope this information helps

Thank you

Hi @erick401,
Is everything up to date on the site? Have you tried disabling other plugins? I know JS can be tricky and it’s easy for other plugin JS files to conflict.

You’re also welcome to email our support team at idxsupport at flexmls dot com if you prefer email over a public forum.

Thank you!

@punkerben I apologize for the delay. I usually get email notifications for new posts here. I do have a bug ticket in so when we have a plugin developer staffed again we’ll have them take a look at this and fix the problem. Thank you!

Hi @cloudz

There is currently not a search field that does that. But the agent could create a saved search for a specific agent’s listings in their flexmls account and create an IDX link – https://fbsdata.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/232020167-Agent-Listings-Link

Next, clear the cache in the plugin and you can apply that saved search/link to a widget.

Let me know if you have any questions,

Thanks!

Thank you very much for the info @austinginder

Would you be able to email me the plugin key you’re using? I’d like to try a few things on my WP testing site. My email is mattf at flexmls dot com

Thank you!

Hi @austinginder I apologize for the delay on this.

Was the plugin activated and have a key applied to it? I’m trying to produce this on my testing site so I can pass more information over to the plugin developer.

If you would be able to send a list of your active plugins and which versions of PHP and WordPress that are being used, we’d greatly appreciate it. It may be best for you to send it to me: mattf at flexmls dot com

Thank you!

@anurup are there any firewalls in place? Have you tried toggling plugins off?
Something is preventing the widget from reaching out to the Location Search service. Looking at my browser console it isn’t even reaching out.

Even the placeholder text is not showing properly. Perhaps another plugin or component of the theme is interfering.

You could also try “Turn off loading Select2 scripts in User area only” in case another plugin is already loading the select2 scripts on the frontend.

Here’s an example of the IDX Search widget working on our plugin documentation/example site…
https://fbsidx.com/plugin/examples/idx-search-widget/#horizontal-themes

@stevschrwp Downloading and installing the plugin is free but, of course, like all IDX services, we charge a fee to flow listing data into the plugin. Our modest, annual fees allow us to keep the plugin updated and ensure that it works with new versions of WordPress as they are released.