Website Security Matters to your Business

Running a business website can be a risky business. Hackers are constantly on the prowl looking for websites to break into and either steal data from or turn into ‘zombies’ to aid them with breaking into other websites…

Online Reputation is King

Imagine, you spend years growing your website and gaining a strong online reputation and traffic to match, then all of sudden overnight you find out that your website has been hacked. All the data has been corrupted and you have no way of recovering anything..  This can and does happen and can happen to you if you are not careful.

Also hackers can be very sneaky – they can sometimes break into your website and use you website reputation for their gain; say by inserting one or all of the following:

• A dubious ad link campaign that only appears to search engine spiders – so your site looks okay, but is actually promoting gambling (or worse) websites;
• Insert a virus into your website that visitors to your website end up downloading and getting infected with because they trust your website…
• Modifying the contact forms so they literally steal all your referrals and use them as part of a social engineering campaign to steal identities…

The above 3 are only the tip of the iceberg – the trouble is you will find out about them until it is too late – which will do your business harm and do harm to the long term reputation of your website. This is because most search engines are able to ‘sniff’ your website looking for such problems, and if they find any they will delist you from their indices – as they don’t want people visiting your ‘infected’ website – it’s just bad for everyone.

What can you do?

In this situation it’s really down to the security qualities of your website hosting provider to ensure that you are safe from hackers – but how on earth do you assess that?

Well, the Website Checker can assist you in this assessment – there is a section of the Report dedicated to ‘sniffing out’ common website hosting security problems and scoring the hosting for you. In our experience scoring highly on security in the Website Checker report is a good sign of a hosting provider who is serious about online security.

Give the Website Checker a go now on your website and find out if you have a security issue, click here to start .