I Thought Page Names Could Hide My Site Structure

I think I made a very beginner mistake.

I installed WordPress in a fairly normal way, and then I thought I was being clever by giving some pages short coded names.

Things like simple letters and numbers.

At the time, I thought it would make the structure a little harder to understand from the outside.

But then I checked my Cloudflare logs.

Some traffic was reaching pages directly, and it made me realize something obvious.

If a page is listed in a sitemap, it is not hidden.

A sitemap is a map.

I know, very basic.

Still, it is a strange feeling when you see automated traffic following paths you thought were not very visible.

Nothing serious happened.

No damage.

No takeover.

But I learned something simple.

Changing page names is not security.

Publishing a sitemap means the visible structure can be crawled.

And Cloudflare logs can be a very uncomfortable teacher.

I do not fully understand all of it yet, but this blog is my new home base, so I will do my best to keep improving the articles here.