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How to Block a Website and Save Your Business from Losses

Almost ten years ago, a survey revealed that 64% of employees visited websites unrelated to work, spending anything from minutes to hours outside of their legitimate tasks daily. After all these years, the problem of cyberloafing is still here, affecting office workers, remote employees, and students alike. The latter rings true based on a 2021 study that resulted in 50% of its participants reporting they were guilty of cyberloafing.

Certainly, terminating access to the Web for your staff would be a crazy idea in the digitalization era, when employees of all levels use multiple online tools for performing various business operations. The more so that some studies show positive effects of cyberloafing, namely, innovative behavior promotion, burnout reduction, and mental health improvement. So, you need to understand what websites are bad for your workflow before you get down to actions. And we are ready to explain why you should disable certain online resources and how to block a website with Work Examiner’s products.

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Productivity is an obvious aspect that suffers from inappropriate Internet usage at work. According to one of the above-mentioned studies, employees are usually distracted by checking their emails, reading news, shopping online, browsing social pages, and searching for information in Google. However, many websites can be both a distracter and assistance, depending on who is using them. For example, it would be an odd decision to prohibit your HR department from visiting LinkedIn or keep your PR staff away from Facebook.

Here is where Controlio provides much more flexibility compared with built-in features of different OSs and browsers. You can apply different blocking rules for different teams, computers, and users, thus adjusting Internet access to your business goals. Actually, it is you who decide which websites, apps, and even messengers are productive or distractive.

What is more, you can change the default productivity levels of sites and applications right from the activities report and tailor each metric to the specifics of your departments.

Security Threats

This is another crucial reason to block a website at work — many of them run vulnerable software, distribute malware, or suffered a security breach. You will be surprised to learn that up to 46% of Alexa Top 50 sites for different countries can pose risks to the cybersecurity of your business. Those threats can come from quite innocent news and media sites, entertainment and arts resources, platforms dedicated to travels, and so on. Surely, you would want to eliminate the risks as much as possible, especially if they are associated with non-work-related websites.

Again, Work Examiner’s employee monitoring tools facilitate the task by providing an auto-updatable database of three million web resources categorized based on their focus areas. Instead of hunting for each potentially dangerous webpage, you can use this feature to block whole site categories commonly associated with safety concerns.

Inappropriate Content

Over 40% of employers have caught their personnel visiting adult, gaming, and gambling sites. The figures are impressive enough to raise awareness of this awkward topic and single it out. In addition to productivity loss and security concerns, which all apply to porn and gambling, inappropriate websites also come with other dangers — sexual harassment, gambling law violations, and other offenses that can easily land you in court.

Needless to say, Controlio has a ready-made solution for those who don’t want to tinker with manually picking pieces of inappropriate content to fence it off. Moreover, you will receive alerts informing you of violators trying to access a restricted site and can set up a warning to prevent accidental violation or redirect your employees to work-related pages.

How to Block a Website with Controlio

All Work Examiner’s products come with web-filtering to deliver you a simple way to block any unwanted site. You will see how easy it is through the example of Controlio:

• Open your Dashboard and go to Rules.
• Press Create to set up a new rule.
• Create a name for this rule and choose Visit Website from the drop-down list of Event Type.

• Select users or teams from the next list to specify who will be prohibited to access a website and add exceptions in the following box if needed.

• Use the Notify feature to receive alerts if the rule is violated.

• Enter a required URL into the Website box or click on the plus icon to select a category.

• Make your rule more precise by exempting certain websites from the selected categories.
• Select Block from the list of actions and type in a message if you wish to give a warning.

• Press Save to finish the process.

Voilà, you have unwanted websites blocked while granting sufficient access to the online tools your employees really need for fulfilling their tasks.

Article Photo © Geek Calendar | Flickr

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