If you have a website, you must be familiar with the concept and issues of web security. Let’s discuss why web security is so important for your business, but before that, let’s define what web security is.
What is Web Security?
Nowadays, where every business struggles to have a solid online presence, many organizations are concerned with web security. The web is among the top vectors that face cyber attacks. Using DNS services makes it even worse, because these, along with the web form, 91% of which is susceptible to malware attacks. Email and web combined are a key element in 99% of breaches on the internet.
The importance of getting web security solutions is undisputed all over the world. The issue is on the minds of anyone who’s involved in building and running a website. At the same time, organizations are facing a situation where getting protection against web security issues is becoming more and more challenging every year. Following are a few examples of web security issues.
- Thwart login attacks where a hacker impersonates a user by stealing login credentials, and gains access to sensitive data
- Limitations in the skills and resources of those who can provide web security solutions
- Malware, which is activated when a user opens a malicious attachment or clicks a malicious link
- Denial of service, whereby a computer is flooded with a cyber attack that makes it unable to respond to user’s requests
- Phishing attacks that use fake communication (like spam emails) to trick the user into clicking on something to open it with specified instructions for stealing personal information, such as a credit card number
- Password attacks, whereby accounts are hacked by stealing passwords, and the hacker gets access to a load of information
Even though IT security departments of many firms constantly work to ensure web security and maintain web security standards, they often face serious hiccups in their efforts to secure the web. Some make an HTTPS website, but still face problems in ensuring web security for the other platforms used in their marketing.
Some firms come up with on-premises web security solutions for managing email and ensuring web security. But more organizations are looking into all-inclusive email and web security solutions. They use cloud-based technologies and integrated solutions to simplify the task and reduce the funds spent in minimizing the risks.
Attackers and hackers usually leverage web channels and email together, we need seamless and scalable strategies for developing web security and protecting both.
Why is Web Security Important?
The importance of web security keeps rising every year. Being safe in the online world is vital to successfully running a business online. Web security is also needed for protecting all the personal information we share on social media sites that we usually integrate with our website.
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Here are 5 major reasons web security is so important.
1. Hackers Can Steal Your Customers
Hackers use malicious software to infect different websites. Once a website is hacked, the hacker gets access to data, and sometimes, to your computer’s resources as well. This can be dangerous for your business and is a major web security issue because now they have information about your customers, which they can use to redirect your site’s traffic and infect the visitors with the same malicious software.
When your site visitors notice they get infected with a virus every time they open your website, they will stop coming to your site and you will end up losing customers. Hackers have thousands of malware types and thousands of ways to attack your brand website. If one method fails, they use another method until they succeed. They use automated tools to hack so that you can never trace them. This means your website is never fully protected.
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Hacked websites are used for retargeting your potential audience and future site visitors. This is terrible for your business, as it means if your website gets hacked, you won’t only lose your existing customers, but will also lose the chance to get new customers.
Usually when a new website is created, about 56% of the traffic it gets comes from automated sources like these hacking tools, spammers, scrapers, bots and other impersonators. That’s why it is utterly important to think of web security as a major concern from the very first day of launching your website.
2. The Number of Hacked Websites is Constantly Rising
All hacked websites, as mentioned above, are used to retarget customers. This means if your website is hacked, all the outbound or inbound marketing effort you will put in to drive traffic to your site will be wasted, as your potential audiences will be redirected to other internet sources instead of coming to your site.
In order to keep your customers safe, it is important that you take solid measures to ensure your web security. A study showed that there is a web security issue and attack across the internet every 39 seconds. Websites that use non-secure usernames or passwords are more susceptible to such attacks because they give more chances of success to the attackers.
You can reduce the chances of success for attackers by implementing web security solutions. An attack does not mean your website will be hacked. There are thousands of attacks every day that don’t get successful because the web security for those sites is in place.
Google keeps sending from time to time notifications to all registered website owners via Google Search Console to alert them about the possible web security threats that impact the site’s appearance in search results.
3. Your Business Reputation Could be at Stake
If your website gets hacked, it would have a negative impact on the reputation of your business. Your customers would see your website as a threat to their device’s web security. This is because when your site is hacked and added to blacklists, any customers that browse through it cannot find the products and services you are offering. To make it worse, they might get warned about a virus or malicious software while they are on your site, which will make them leave and probably never come back. This will increase your site’s bounce rate and harm your brand’s reputation.
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4. It Affects Your Website’s Discoverability
There are over 1.5 billion websites across the internet today, and people depend on search engines to explore them. If your website’s SEO is not good, it will not be discoverable. Putting in effort to enhance your site’s search rankings is part of implementing web security solutions for your business. Websites with good SEO are less susceptible to web security issues.
This also works the other way round. If your web security is low, your website’s SEO will be negatively affected, reducing its search rankings and making it less discoverable on search engines.
5. Ensuring Web Security Pre-hand is Cheaper Than Website Clean-up
If your website gets affected, you might have to go through a complete website clean-up. That will, almost in all cases, cost you a lot more than ensuring your web security pre-hand to avoid any such attacks.
The first thing a website owner does when he finds out his website has been hacked is search on Google ‘How to clean up a hacked website’. A lot of blog articles can be found on search engines to guide you through the process, but you will notice that it’s always recommended hiring a professional to do this job. This means you will probably have to pay a substantial amount of money to get your site cleaned up once it has been hacked.
Why not work on your web security to prevent such attacks to begin with? Even if you have to spend money to implement good web security standards on your site, it will be less than what you’ll have to spend if your site gets hacked.
Simple Tips to Enhance Your Web Security
Here are some tips that will help you ensure and maintain your site's web security.
- Keep all your plugins and software up to date.
- Add an SSL Certificate to your website.
- Choose a smart password for your devices and accounts.
- Use a secure web hosting service.
- Record admin privileges and user access on your site.
- Change the default settings of your CMS.
- Backup your website regularly.
- Know where your web server configuration files are.
- Apply for a firewall for your website.
- Tighten your network security.
If you build a website on Strikingly, we have a feature available that will help you maintain your web security.
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We offer a free HTTPS version for all our users’ websites. This means that your visitors can access your website as its HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure version, making the connection between them and your site encrypted. This will make your site visitors feel confident that their personal information is not being revealed to third-parties. People like to keep their information confidential when they are filling out their credit/debit card details on an e-commerce site.
In case you face any technical issues in building and running a website with us, you can contact us any time through our live chat support. We love to see our users’ online businesses prosper by keeping their websites secure and helping them in their web maintenance.
