Website maintenance is critical to any business, big or small. It’s important for personal sites as well. That is if you really want people to find your site and view it, contact you through it, leave comments to your blog posts, or buy your products.
Maintenance can apply to many aspects of a website. This 2-part article will touch on several key areas of concern. The first article discusses content maintenance while this part will discuss website Security.
Website Security
Website security is not about locking people out of your website, it’s about keeping your website safe when your visitors have malicious intent.
There are passive and active measures that you can take.
Passive measures include doing regular backups of your website. If you never make changes to your site, then backups do not have to be performed very frequently. Hopefully your site is in a state of constant refresh, in which case daily backups are a good idea. If you have a very active blog site, then you may need even more frequent backups. And be sure to store you backups in a safe repository and not on your local server. Many backup solutions can save your backups to the cloud at repositories such as Dropbox.com. When your site is hacked, that recent backup may be your fastest and cheapest fix.
Another important passive measure is to ensure your website “software” is always current. A site built on WordPress will see updates to WordPress core or your site’s plugins several times a month, sometimes several times a week. Most of these updates are fixes to plug security holes that have been discovered. Your malicious visitors are very tenacious in their attempts to find a way in and do harm to your website. Mostly they want to use your website to send their message to your visitors or take over your domain name and redirect your visitors to their website.
An active measure you can take is to have a service, such as sucuri.net, actively monitor your site for malicious invasions. Sucuri will scan your website every 6 hours and check for viruses or files that have been modified and now contain a malicious code signature. Yes, hackers leave a kind of signature behind that identifies the nature of their hack. Companies like Sucuri constantly monitor and protect against website hackers.
What Can You Do?
Keep reading articles like this one that talks about the latest attempts by hackers to take advantage of your website. Keep your website fresh with current content to hold your visitors interested in your message. Seek help when you get in over your head, when you think there is a problem and don’t know how to fix it.
Sucuri.net has a great blog on the latest hacker activities and solutions.
But most importantly, take the advice in this article and protect your website.
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