Too many small businesses neglect protecting their website
There’s a lot of chatter about business websites nowadays. Well, I say nowadays, it’s pretty much been going on for a good few years now. What interests me is that all the talk seems to be around one topic; web traffic. Everywhere you look people are talking about how they can get more site visitors and improve their web traffic. Then, as a follow-on from this, they want to work on ways they can convert their traffic to leads, and start gaining customers or making money, etc.
All the discussions ultimately revolve around your website output. What are you getting from your website? For businesses, as mentioned, it’s all about customers and money at the end of the day. As a result, the focus is firmly on doing things to improve your chances of gaining both these things. People work on gaining both organic and paid web traffic, they put systems in place to convert traffic/leads, and so on. Don’t get me wrong, this is absolutely what you should be doing. If you want the front end of your website to be as effective as possible, you need to do everything I’ve mentioned and work on improving web traffic and SEO, etc.
My whole point is that this is something you should do, not the only thing. Too many companies, particularly small businesses started up by self-employed people, only focus on this one thing. They only care about traffic and performance, nothing else. As a consequence, they neglect one of the most important things; protecting their website.
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The Importance Of Protecting Your Website
The burning question on your lips is probably something along the lines of; why do I need to protect my website? What makes this such an important thing to consider? In essence, how does neglecting this affect the performance of your site?
A lot of people and businesses neglect to protect their website as they don’t think it has an effect on how well the website performs. For example, they don’t think their traffic will be affected, or that they’ll make less money if they don’t protect their site.
The fact is, failing to protect your website can cause loads of performance problems. It can lead to a decrease in traffic which will have a knock on effect and perhaps cause a loss of customers and money. Not only that, but it creates major security problems for your business as people can hack your site and gain loads of personal and confidential information. To make things even worse, a hacker can alter your site and make you post things or display images that can tarnish your reputation and require you to build it back up.
The Two Main Threats To Your Website
Obviously, you can’t protect your website if you don’t know what threats are facing it. I’ve already touched upon one of the main threats; hackers. We’ll take a look at this threat in more detail in just a bit, but there’s also another threat to consider too; copyright. This section of the guide will also touch upon this threat too and look at it in more detail.
Copyright Infringement
What are copyright infringements and how are they a threat to your website? I’m sure most of you are generally aware of what a copyright infringement is. Essentially, if someone or another business copies something that belongs to you and you haven’t given them permission, then they’ve broken the law.
Speaking with regards to your business website, copyright infringements revolve around your content. It’s unbelievably common for websites to straight up steal content from other websites. This can be website text, blog content, or even images. They’re not allowed to do this thanks to something called the DMCA, which is a law that protects your digital content. If your website has DMCA protection, it means that you can take action against anyone that steals your content. You’ve basically copyrighted the content and made it so people can’t steal it without getting penalized.
So, you need to protect your site from all the people out there that try and steal your content in one way or another. The obvious reason for this is simply because it’s not right. You and your team spent time creating the content, and you don’t want other people to use it against your will. But, the problem with this runs a lot deeper than that. Think about it this way, if a website steals your content and copies everything you’ve written, they’re getting the benefits that content provides you with.
Let me try and explain this as simply as possible. If you’ve written content on a web page designed to be SEO-friendly, it will use keywords effectively and help boost your search ranking. So, if another site comes along and copies everything word for word, it can give them a boost too. As such, they can now compete with you in the same search results and may end up stealing some traffic that would have visited your site. Consequently, your loss of traffic has that knock on effect I spoke of earlier. Less traffic equals fewer leads which equate to fewer customers which mean less money.
By protecting your website, you can stop people from stealing your content and getting away with it. If it’s DMCA protected, you can find stolen content and move to have it taken down. As a result, you don’t have to worry about people using your content to steal traffic away from you.
Hackers
When most people think about protecting their website, this is the main thing that comes to mind. Hackers can damage a site in so many ways, and I’ve already mentioned a few earlier. There’s almost no limit to what they can do, it all depends on the ability of the hacker.
When someone hacks your site, they can control so many things. They might alter the way your website looks and display rude content that completely wrecks your reputation. To make matters worse, they can simply take your site offline. They do this either directly by hacking the server and bringing it offline, or indirectly by forcing you to bring your site offline. Think about it, if they hack your site and change all your content and display rude things that harm your reputation, you won’t want people to see it, so you’ll take your site offline temporarily.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, hackers can steal information from your website. This could mean loads of your customers get their private info stolen, and it leads to a huge fallout with your customer base.
You can protect your website from hackers by beefing up IT security. The great idea is to hire an ethical hacker; someone that will attempt to hack your site and show you all the weak points, then fix the faults. What better way to stay safe from hackers than by having someone on board that thinks like a hacker? It helps your site become so much harder to break into. Make your website impenetrable, and all these problems will never come about.
Conclusion
In conclusion, you need to protect your website from various threats if you want to have the best performance possible. People that steal your content can cause issues with traffic, while hackers can harm your reputation and steal important information.
The main thing to take away from this guide is that protection should come first. Protect your site from these threats and then focus on traffic and improving its performance.
