Two years ago, Google announced that more than 50 million websites worldwide are infected with malicious code. Last year, there was a 212% increase in that number. What does that mean? It means your website has to protect itself. Did you know that another site can infect yours and make it vulnerable to attack?
Website security is essential for your business and we have five very good reasons why. Website security denotes trust and competency, is essential for search engine optimization (SEO), helps avoid spoofing, prevents customer data exploitation, and offers protection from hacking.
Website Security Denotes Trust and Competency
Your reputation is at stake, so you need to be trustworthy. Your customers and clients are trusting you with their money, credit card information, and other data, so the right level of security is necessary.
If customers lose trust in your business, that means you lose revenue. If you visited an e-commerce website and saw a security warning, you would probably click away? Statistically, 99% of your audience would. Up-to-date security is necessary to prevent something like this from happening.
Website Security Is Essential for SEO
Did you know that you can be blacklisted from search engines based on the security of your site? If your site and/or IP Address isn’t secure or shows malicious intent in some fashion, it’s not unusual to have your search engine rank stripped. This means you can’t be found in regular search results.
The longer you take to act, the longer it will take to get your site reputation back. This affects your bottom line since over 95% of organic traffic originates through search engines. In addition, Google and most browsers now let you know if a site is secure or not. Would you trust your money, data, and identity to an unsecured site?
Website Security Helps Avoid Spoofing
If someone spoofs your site, that means they mimic your site in an attempt to trick visitors into giving up their information. Important data should always be secured to prevent complete spoofing.
Think about fake IRS websites and Amazon pages that trick people every year. They look similar to the original page but have strange domain endings. The IRS site, for instance, ends in the .gov suffix, but the spoof site may show a different extension. Education sites are also common spoof sites.
Website Security Prevents Customer Data Exploitation
Hosting companies, security companies, plugins, and extensions can all work together to protect customer data. The best security companies are ones that frequently test your site using something called “ethical hacking.” Ethical hacking occurs when the security company pounds at your security system to see if they can find any holes or leaks for hackers to gain access. Hackers and other criminals want that data to steal money, identities and perform other cyber crimes.
Website Security Provides Protection From Hacking
Hacking is on the rise, and the days of having your site specifically targeted by malicious individuals are less common; hacking is now much more random than that. Hackers target broadly and look for common vulnerabilities.
A hacker may infect your site with ransomware, redirect traffic somewhere else, infect visitors with malware, mine untraceable crypto-currencies, steal identities, and more. Security patches, out of date plugins and extensions, lack of secure hosting, and more can leave your site vulnerable to attack.
It’s worth it to invest in website security. Website clean-up, after all, is far more expensive in time, money, and reputation than protection after an attack. Securing your site can take a few minutes while a clean-up process can take hours, if not days. Losing your reputation through search engines and customers can be immeasurable.
Choose a secure hosting company to ensure your website isn’t just showing secure, but all information is encrypted and protected from hackers. InMotion Hosting brings secure and powerful hosting for your website. Learn all of the details today.
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