The world is more connected than ever before. The internet has made everything easier to find and more accessible. While that’s great for growing your business, learning new things, and creating new relationships, it also means that security is more important than ever. Here’s why you need to make sure that your WordPress website is secure.
Small Doesn’t Mean Safe
If you are a small business-owner, WordPress is a great tool to quickly and easily build your website, but just because you are small, doesn’t mean you are immune to hackers. Hackers look to exploit any websites that are secure. You don’t have to be a huge business to be targeted.
In fact, hackers often target small businesses because they usually don’t have secure websites making them easier to exploit. Because it’s likely that you don’t have a full-service web team working around the clock to make sure your site is up-to-date and secure, your site may have vulnerabilities that allow hackers to install malicious software on your site and use it to target your users, sending them to spam websites or even infecting their accounts.
Your Site Isn’t Chosen
While it might seem like hackers pick and choose sites that they view as vulnerable, they actually automate the process. They run scripts around the clock that search for websites with vulnerabilities. Once a vulnerability is found the script will do one or more of the following:
- Install malware
- Steal users’ information
- Redirect traffic to outside websites
- Phishing attacks to steal users’ identities
- Deface pages to make them unusable
- Hack other websites and make it look like your site did the hacking
- Get your site blacklisted from sending email
Keep Yourself and Your Clients Safe
An unsecured website doesn’t just put you at risk, it puts anyone who uses your site at risk: your employees, coworkers, clients, potential customers and more. Small business sites are frequently hacked because they have easy to guess passwords that give hackers access to a wide variety of data making it easy to steal numerous people’s identities.
Your Reputation is at Risk
If you have an unsecured site, you are putting your reputation and that of your business at risk. Allowing hackers access to your site and potentially to your users data, can cause serious problems for everyone involved. All it takes is one time for someone you work with to be impacted by the hack and then you are left picking up the pieces.
It’s Not Uncommon
Websites are hacked every single day and the number of sites with security issues keeps going up. Hackers are getting bolder as people grow more complacent about web security. They are taking every advantage of the holes being left and your website might be next.
What To Do
Thankfully, it’s fairly simple to protect your website from hacks like this. Here are some of our top suggestions.
- Don’t use common passwords like “admin” or your company’s name.
- Don’t use the same password for multiple sites.
- Use strong and complicated passwords. While it might be a hassle, it’s worth it.
- Keep your site up to date. The more up to date, the harder it is to hack.
- Install security plugins to increase the strength of your firewall.
- Block IPs that attempt to login multiple times.
- Serve your site over https with an SSL certificate.
- Disable file editing.
- Contact Simply Built!
We’re experts at WordPress and we know how to keep your website safe. Let’s get your site secured today. Contact us for a free consultation!