This app that was created in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in Februar 2022.
The app makes it very easy to block and redirect all traffic from visitors in Russia – or any other country you want to exclude.
You can either redirect the visitors to an external URL (for example to one of the official Ukrainian support sites) or show a simple message.
Search engines excluded
Unlike other GEO-blocking apps this app comes with the option to exclude the major search engine crawlers from being blocked. This will secure that your search engine crawling, indexing and visibility will not suffer.
How effective is this blocking?
Advanced users will be able to circumvent the blocking by using a VPN or fake user agent. However, the far majority of normal users will not know how to do this, so blocking will be quite effective.
Sanction disclaimer
All sanctions comes with a price. This is true for GEO-Blocking apps too. There are two issues you should be aware of:
- The script will be loaded asynchronously and after the primary page is loaded so there is virtually no performance degrade. We have optimized this, so any delay is minimal. This is, in our opinion, a very small price to pay.
- By blocking some users you may upset them. And as a consequence your webshop may be attacked by hackers. However, Shopify have a very secure infrastructure so it is very unlikely this will affect you. We just wanted to mention it.
By the end of the day it is up to you if you want to sanction Russian users or not. The app just makes it easy to do.
