WorkAuditor Website Blocking: Configuration Guide
WorkAuditor website blocking controls which sites employees can reach from monitored computers, using two layers: predefined category filters — social media, streaming, shopping, gambling, and similar groups — and your own custom domain lists. Rules can run around the clock or on a schedule, apply per group rather than globally, and every blocked request is logged in the dashboard. Configuration is where the feature lives or dies: a poorly scoped block breaks legitimate work and gets disabled within a month, while a well-scoped one becomes invisible — which is the goal. The employees' experience should be that the sites are simply not there; the manager's experience should be that policy enforcement stops being a manual conversation.
The Two Layers of Configuration
Category filters are the fast layer. Choose the categories, apply them to a group, done — the vendor maintains the site lists, and new domains in those categories are picked up automatically. Custom domain lists are the precise layer: your own blocklist and, more importantly, your own exceptions, because categories are blunt instruments and every company has legitimate uses inside them. The configuration order I recommend: apply categories first, run in monitoring-only mode for a week — log but don't block — and read which domains your own team legitimately visits inside those categories. That week's log produces your exception list, and it prevents the classic rollout disaster of blocking a vendor portal because it lives under a category the vendor never considered.
Schedules and Groups
Schedules turn blocking from an absolute into a policy. A contact center I work with blocks social media during billable shifts but opens it at lunch — the schedule windows make the rule legible, and compliance ran at ninety percent without a single reprimand. Group application means the marketing team can keep social platforms that the operations floor cannot, and the finance team's exception list stays empty by design. The dashboard shows the rule set per group at a glance, which matters when a new hire in the wrong group starts the week asking why everything is blocked.
A Logistics Back Office's Bandwidth Story
A logistics company with 180 back-office employees ran their monitoring deployment, and the website blocking configuration surfaced a problem before the policy conversation even started: streaming traffic was consuming twenty-eight percent of office bandwidth at peak hours. The monitoring-only week showed the pattern clearly — lunchtime and late-afternoon video, concentrated in the operations group. The rollout: block streaming and social categories for operations around the clock, keep the lunch window open for staff, and leave the sales group untouched because their category usage was low. Bandwidth freed immediately, and help-desk tickets about slow systems dropped by fifteen percent in the following month — nobody had connected the streaming load to the system slowness until the data made it obvious.
The same rollout logged the interesting exception case: the training team used a video platform daily for vendor courses, and the category block would have taken that away. The custom exception list restored the training domain within a day, and the training team's feedback changed from "this will break us" to "fine, it works." That is the sequence the configuration guide is really about: measure first, block second, exempt thoughtfully.
What Website Blocking Can and Cannot Do
Blocking is policy enforcement, not culture. It stops the website from loading; it does not change why an employee drifted there, so it should sit alongside the productivity reports rather than replace conversations. Blocking cannot stop phones — the sites live on personal devices, and no corporate tool fixes that, which is a policy conversation, not a configuration one. And blocking without disclosure creates its own problems: employees discover the block as a surprise, assume the worst, and the tool's credibility takes the hit. Announce the categories and the schedule in the policy, and review the blocked-request log weekly at first — the log shows both the enforcement working and the exception list aging, and both need attention. Add requests through the exceptions process with an expiry, so the list stays honest.
If you need website blocking with categories, schedules, and exception lists, WorkAuditor is cloud-based employee monitoring software for Windows and Mac — full configuration details at https://www.workauditor.com. Which website is costing your team more than you think — and which one would break their work if you blocked it? Website blocking starts with those two answers.