Why protecting your website has never been more critical
Once your business has a beautiful website that you can be proud of – something captivating and helpful to your customers – you are going to want to do everything you can to protect it. Because building a website is only the beginning. The maintenance and care of your site is an ongoing process that is critical to its continued usefulness and appeal, no different than with a car or a house.
Security should be at the top of the list of your maintenance priorities. Losing control of your site to hackers or putting your customers’ information at risk could have severe business consequences. Fortunately, Fryed Egg can help you take every precaution so that your site has the kind of sophisticated, resolute protection that it deserves.
A strong, successful approach to protecting your site revolves around proactive, preventative efforts on three primary fronts. Each is key to maintaining the continuity not only of your website but of your business operations and reputation.
1) Encrypting traffic
You will want to secure and maintain a SSL security certificate, which allows for encrypted communication between a web browser and a web server. This encrypted communication ensures that the traffic to and from your website remains private and inaccessible to those who are not intended to view it. If you’re handling customer information, such as payments or other personal details, then an SSL certificate is particularly crucial.
A website with an SSL certificate is easily identifiable by the HTTPS in its domain name rather than having HTTP. In addition to the security value of encrypted traffic, Google highly values SSL certificates, helping drive search-related visits to your site – another major incentive to secure a certificate for your organization.
2) Stay updated
The security and vulnerabilities of websites represent an ever-evolving challenge. New challenges emerge, and new efforts are created to repel those challenges. That’s why implementing recommended updates to your site’s software and plug-ins is essential. Without them, your site could become exposed to any number of new threats that had not been previously anticipated and prepared for.
Fryed Egg manages regular updates for their clients, recommending these updates are made on a monthly basis. Updates include security enhancements and patches and vulnerability repairs that keep your site protected against the latest risks.
3) Build a firewall
Your website needs a firewall as “a hard stop” effort to keep hackers from infiltrating your website. A firewall is a network security device that determines which incoming and outgoing traffic to allow to your website and which to block. Firewalls are essential to preventing hackers from accessing your website and taking control of it. The disruptions that can result from a hack are immense. For instance, we know from news reports that a cyberattack recently put at risk the operations of a U.S. energy company’s pipeline that delivers 45% of all fuel consumed on the East Coast.
Hacks can take many forms, but the results ultimately can be crippling. One form of attack on the rise is the ransomware attack, which occurs when criminals scramble your organization’s data with encryption and then hold your site hostage. The hackers leave instructions for you to pay a costly ransom to access a decryption key that will give you control of your site back. It’s a price you don’t want to pay.
Fryed Egg can help you navigate these threats and others as part of our holistic website maintenance, support and optimization services. We will guide you through the best preemptive efforts to take, while also maintaining our commitment to provide support if you become a target. Learn about our website services or contact us for a free consultation. Reach us at (813) 478-0494 or [email protected].