TIME TO SHOW YOUR WEBSITE SOME LOVE
HOW WELL MAINTAINED IS YOUR BUSINESS’S WEBSITE RIGHT NOW? ALEX GARDEN RECOMMENDS A REGULAR TUNE-UP IF YOU WANT TO SAVE YOURSELF, AND YOUR BUSINESS, SOME MAJOR ANGST.
Alex Garden recommends a regular website tune-up if you want to save yourself, and your business, some major angst.
There are plenty of reasons why your website needs your care and attention, but the most important one is that neglect and disinterest nearly always comes back to bite you where it hurts.
It’s like that car noise you should have checked out; that grumpy customer you should have got back to; or that employee background check you didn’t get around to.
You can guarantee that the damage caused by indifference is exponentially more than the time and cost to sort it out at the time.
Why should your website be any different?
We live in a world where a bored teenager in Kazakhstan can damage your brand simply because your website or its hosting setup has a flaw.
Wordpress websites are a case in point. There is nothing wrong with Wordpress as a platform but because they make up roughly 20 percent of all Internet websites, they’re a target.
We see many Wordpress sites that have been built by a web developer and then neglected by that developer, and website owner, for years – to a point where they pose a significant security risk.
We saw so many poorly maintained Wordpress sites several years back that we decided we needed to actively manage them, because they were being hacked and it was disrupting our servers.
So why would hackers bother?
The main reasons we see are:
• To get control of your site so phishing pages can be set up. These are pages designed to look like banks or well- known sites, and are used to send unwitting people to, to divulge important information such as bank logins or credit card information.
• To send bulk spam email, often to promote a phishing site. Spammer’s servers get shut down regularly so
they need to move around.
• To plant malicious code on a webpage that allows the hacker to take control of a user’s machine.
• To show off to their friends and community.
How do you avoid becoming a victim?
Most websites are built as a CMS (Content Management System) that allow non-web designers to update them. Here’s a very simple checklist you could follow:
1. Whose responsibility is it to keep the website/cms system up to date? This would normally be your web designer, but is that part of your agreement with them? If you no longer have contact with your web designer find someone else who can help.
2. Are all access passwords at least eight characters and random, or long form? For example, a long form password could be an old street address that no- one else knows. Of course, you can’t remember all these passwords, these days you require a password manager.
3. Has your site had a security audit to check everything is in order? In Wordpress, plugins such as Wordfence can do a lot of this for you.
4. Does anyone within your organisation have access to the
CMS to make changes? If not, go back to your web designer.
5. Is your website backed up daily? We recommend that it should be copied somewhere away from where it is hosted. It means if something goes wrong (e.g. it’s hacked) it can be easily restored.
Your website is no different to everything else in your business and life. If it’s neglected, at some stage it will hurt you. So why don’t you show it some love now and save yourself the angst?