As a business owner, your website’s security needs to be a top priority. While you may believe that only large businesses and corporations are at risk of being hacked, the truth is that amount of cyber attacks on small online businesses has only intensified.

In fact, 43% of all cyber attacks are aimed directly against small businesses. Unfortunately, very few business owners the importance of having a secure site and what can happen if it gets hacked. It is important to know the consequences so actions can be put in place to secure your website against cyber attacks.

What Are The Consequences Of Your Website Being Hacked?

IDENTITY THEFT

This is the main reason website get hacked. Hackers will attempt to break into websites. Most of the time, hackers will either later sell that information to clients for use in identity theft rather than using it themselves or use it for ransom.

SITE SPEED CAN SLOW DOWN

Another reason a cyber criminals may attempt to hack into your website is to store thousands of files, on your server. This will greatly slow down your website’s speed, and not only will that cause you to lose out on the already short attention spans of your visitors, but it will also cause your SEO rankings to take a hit.

YOUR SITE COULD CRASH COMPLETELY

It is quite possible that your website could crash and receive a “404 error” message, it’s a clear sign that your website has been hacked. It is normal for it to crash temporarily if changes are being made or hosting is doing a few changes, but a blank screen with a 404 error is not normal.

What Are The Steps You Can Take To Protect Your Site?

First step in any security for your website is to establish strong passwords. Storing them and changing them regular is key. Trying a two-factor authentication to login is not a bad idea either.
One very important step is to have a SSL certification, which means data being transmitted between your server and the browser of the user will be kept secure. Google also looks for site with a SSL and will help rank those with it higher in the search results. The last thing recommended is being able to backup your site. Make it easier on yourself and find a web host that can create daily backups.

If you want to make things a lot easier, look into a manged WordPress hosting plan as it will keep your plugins up to date and remove any security vulnerabilities issues. Along with the security, backup as done automatically every 24 hours. Our hosting plans is consist of a managed WordPress solution.

Give us a call at 215-723-3495 to talk about more over to a managed WordPress solution or fill out the form to the right To claim your FREE consultation and personal marketing road-map