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In this digital world, having a website for your business, blog, the portfolio has become a necessity. When visitors love your content or products, they become regulars. Therefore, catering to visitors becomes a top priority for website owners. However, not all visitors attracted to your website come bearing good wishes.
Hackers are always on the lookout for websites with weak security so as to exploit them. To do this, they have various tools at their disposal which make their task easier. However, as a website owner, it is your job to keep them at bay.
Because even if a hacker fails to exploit one website they can move on to another target, however, if you fall prey to such attacks you stand to lose a lot. All the hard work, time, and money that you have invested will be for naught. Therefore, it is very important for people to realize the importance of having a secure website.
We have listed below a few reasons as to why you should keep your website security your first priority so that you can be informed about the pros and cons associated with it.
Protection from Cyberattacks:
In the current COVID-19 pandemic, cyberattacks have been up to over 600% with hackers posing as CDC, WHO, or Government representatives to scam people. This spells bad news for website owners as a rising number of cyberattacks means there’s a high chance that their own website might come under attack.
If a hacker manages to hack into your website, they can leave all sorts of malware, steal user data, install malware or crypto mining software into your visitor’s computers, etc. This spells doom if the website security is not able to keep the hackers at bay. Investing in secure hosting should be prioritized as Website Clean-up is far more expensive and time-consuming than Website Security.
Remember to always update your certificates and out-of-date plugins as these new patches provide security against the ingenious techniques hackers deploy to gain access to your website.
Essential For SEO:
With more than 1.5 billion websites currently available on the internet, having your website stand out at the top has become a literal rat race. However, if your website has some major flaws present in it, search engines usually tend to quarantine such websites and as a result, the organic growth drops by over 95%.
From July 2018, websites without SSL(HTTPS) were marked as not safe and received some serious SEO blowback. Keeping this in mind, website owners need to maintain/increase their SEO by following key security protocols so as to not get blacklisted by search engines.
Prevents Revenue Loss:
When a website with weak security is under attack, hackers try to make changes in the source code in order to create exploits. This may cause the website to go down as the source code won’t work properly. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that, increased downtime directly equates to a loss of revenue.
The longer your website is unavailable to access, the more visitors you lose, thus losing on potential sales. Thus, if you have the most up-to-date security protocols, you can avoid such mishaps and scale your website to a higher level.
Prevents Data Leak:
When a customer signs up on your website, they expect you to respect their privacy and hope that you will keep their data safe from prying eyes. However, in the event of a cyberattack, the hacker might get access to confidential customer data which they might use for their own benefits as it becomes a goldmine of data for them. In today’s world, doxing a person digitally has become easy and it might lead to serious repercussions for the affected person. Therefore, safeguards need to be implemented on your website so that its security cannot be compromised.
Avoid Website Spoofing:
In simple words, Website Spoofing is the act of creating an exact replica of the target website so as to draw visitors from the original website to the replica website. In the presence of flawed security measures, Website Spoofing can be a cakewalk for some hackers.
Business owners, bloggers put in hours of work for months on end so that they can draw a significant number of visitors to their websites to earn some income. However, all this hard work can go down the drain if the security of the website is subpar.
Hackers can hack into the website, download all the source code, get it up on a similar-looking URL and steal the original website’s visitors just like that in a matter of hours.
Gain a Competitive Edge Over Your Opponents:
Suppose Company A and Company B are business rivals. They each own a website where they sell the exact same product. Both are fairly competitive and always try to gain an upper hand on each other. However one day, Company B falls prey to a vicious cyberattack from which they take a few days to recover.
But when they reopen, they find out that their daily visitors are falling day by day. Consumers are reluctant to visit their websites because they are afraid that their personal data might get leaked again. Company A profits from this as all the traffic is being diverted from Company B’s website to their website because of one single reason.
They invested in good website security. This exact same model is applicable in a real-world scenario. Therefore, it is important for you as a website owner to take appropriate action so as to avoid this problem.
Having a secure website not only helps grow your business but also provides peace of mind. You can rest assured that the data on your website is safe from falling into the wrong hands. Running a business is hard. And if investing in a good security system is one less headache, then people should jump at this opportunity.
Hackers won’t stop exploiting other people’s hard work just so they can make a quick buck off of it. However, it is your responsibility that you don’t fall prey to such attacks by lessening your vulnerabilities. We hope that this helped you gain some insights on this matter, and hope that you find this applicable to you if need be.
