Your business website is a resourceful tool, giving your customers continuous access even when you aren’t available. However, it is prone to cyber attacks, resulting in data loss, financial damage, lawsuits, and so on. Research also indicates that over 73% of websites are hacked, affecting their SEO and destroying their rankings on Google SERPs. Investing in your business website’s security is necessary to avoid these. Here are 3 tips worth considering to achieve the desired results.
By Team Savant
Image: Towfiqu Barbhuiya
1. Strengthen Your Passwords
Your passwords prevent people from accessing your website without your permission. However, cybercriminals like hackers can break through weak passwords and advertise products you don’t own. And this can cost time, money and customer loss. Worse, they can remove your website content or destroy your website altogether. To prevent these, it becomes expedient to update your password regularly. Experts advise creating stronger options to prevent hackers from guessing them easily. And you can achieve this by including at least 12 characters.
While at it, avoid using words alone; numbers and symbols can make your password unpredictable, so keep this in mind. You can also break down your favourite sentence as a password if you can’t memorise random letters, symbols and numbers. Mixing up capital and small letters for the best effects is important. For instance, ‘I love to eat pizza and watch movies during midnight hours’ becomes ‘Il2Ep&wmDmH!’
2. Ensure That Your Software And Plug-Ins Are Current
It’s not uncommon for businesses to still work with outdated software and plug-ins on their websites. However, this practice can be more harmful than beneficial. For starters, your website can crash anytime, causing your clients to switch to your competitors’ websites. It also leaves your site vulnerable to hacking and other cyberattacks. You risk exposing your clients’ confidential information to criminals, leading to identity theft and other problems. Your business can face lawsuits, loss of credibility and even foreclosure. Therefore, you’ll find it helpful to update your software and plug-ins periodically. Experts advise doing this every two to five years, so keep this in mind.
3. Audit Your Website Frequently
Conducting a website audit is beneficial for many reasons. For starters, you can quickly detect errors that can harm your website’s SEO, such as broken videos and backlinks, spam, and so on. Moreover, you can get an advantage over hackers by discovering security weaknesses, loopholes, misconfigurations, website defacement and malware. You can also determine and fix any breach in security protocols and policies, so keep this in mind. You can begin by running a security scan to determine if your website is blocked or has outdated software. You can also detect malware with a scan, so feel free to consider this.
Performing regular updates, securing your domain and IP, and assessing website traffic is also helpful. Another way to audit your website is to perform penetration testing, which involves simulating a cyberattack to reveal vulnerable areas in your website.
Securing your website is a great way to keep your consumers safe, and these tips can help you achieve the desired outcome.