The Webpages rules allow organizations to effectively manage and control employee browsing habits. You can use these rules to ensure corporate resources are used productively, prevent access to inappropriate or dangerous content, or manage the time employees spend on non-work-related websites.

The example below uses a Webpages rule to detect social media sites and restrict user's active time on them.

1. Assign a Rule Name. For example, “Facebook Visits”.

2. Optionally, provide a Rule Description. For example, "Detect visits to facebook.com".

3. Select the Parent Policy the rule will belong to. For example, "Unproductive Behavior Rules".

4. Select “Activity” for Rule Type.

5. Select “Webpages” under Select the type of activities.

6. By default, the rule will inherit the rule targets from its parent policy. However, you can turn off the Inherit targets from Parent Policy option to select them manually.

7. Select employees, computers, and/or departments from the Assign to field (e.g., the Marketing department).

8. Optionally, you can exclude any targets you don’t want to be included using the Exclude from rule field. For example, if you included a department in the Assign to field but want to exclude a few employees from the department, you can exclude them in the Exclude from rule field (e.g., "Anna Wintour"). Then, click the Continue button.

9. A default condition block, "Condition 1," should already be added to the rule. Configure the condition as follows:

10. Add the Webpage url criterion by clicking the +Add button.

11. In the Webpage url field, enter the social media websites you want to detect. Enter them one by one (e.g., "facebook.com", "instagram", etc. and set the condition to Contains for each entry. You can ignore the rest of the options in for this criterion.

12. Click the +Add button again and select the Request type criterion. Then, select is Webpage visited to detect only actual page visits rather than every resource the page requests.

13. Click the +Add button again and select the Time Active (min) criterion. Then, select an operator (e.g., >=) and enter the number of minutes (e.g., 10).

The Basic mode is the easiest way to configure actions and is recommended for beginners.

14. Select one or more actions according to your need. For example, turn on the Warn action to show the user a warning message (e.g., Facebook is not allowed during work hours.), or turn on the Notify action to notify one or more users about the rule violation. Note that some actions cannot be combined (e.g., Lock out user and Block cannot be combined with Warn).

In Advanced mode, you can set up risk thresholds and severity levels for the rule and trigger different actions based on how often a rule is violated. Any actions you set up in the Basic mode appear as the first threshold.

15. From the Choose time period for threshold list, select the desired time period for your thresholds (e.g., Daily).

16. In the Choose maximum numbers of saved alerts per day field, enter the maximum number of alerts that can be triggered for this rule in a single day.

17. Click the New threshold button to add a new threshold. For each threshold you add, you can set the following:

18. Turn on one or more actions for the threshold. These actions (e.g., Notify, Warn) are the same as those available in the Basic mode. In our example, we turned on Notify and selected Anatoly Krause from the Add an employee list. You can also type an email address and click Add.

Unrestricted access to social media can significantly impact employee focus, decrease overall productivity, and lead to unnecessary work delays. While short breaks involving social media may be acceptable or even necessary for specific job roles (such as marketing or community management), the goal is to prevent excessive, non-productive use.

This rule is built around two primary criteria to accurately enforce a time limit: Webpage url is used to specifically identify known social media sites (e.g., "facebook," "instagram," "reddit"), and Time Active (min) is used to measure the active time an employee spends on those sites. The Request type with the Webpage visited option ensure that the rule only detects actual page visits rather than every resource the page requests.

The rule can be refined using additional configurations, such as allowing longer access for marketing staff by choosing them from the Employees tab or only enforcing the limit during core business hours with the Time when rule is active

option on the General Settings tab.