More than 30,000 websites are hacked per day around the world, with a new attack somewhere on the web occurring roughly every 39 seconds. 64% of companies worldwide have experienced at least one form of cyber attack. Cyber attacks cost small businesses an estimated average of £4,200, and medium and large businesses £19,400, according to the Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2022.

Why you should have site protection

Site protection protects you, your customers and web visitors from potentially harmful attacks. If your site is not secure, you risk being attacked or hacked, which could lead to your site crashing, losing money, or putting your data at risk. Aside from the obvious benefit of site protection providing security, it can also boost your rankings on search engine results pages and help to increase traffic to your site. If your site is not secure, people trying to visit your site will be met with a warning telling them to go back which can scare away potential visitors. It is also worth bearing in mind that it will be more expensive, disruptive and time-consuming to recover or clean up a website following an attack than it would be to secure it. To restore a website, you would likely require the help of professionals, which would be costly.

How to make your website secure

There are many ways you can secure your website. Here are some of the most common and important ways to improve the cyber security of your site:  

Add an SSL certificate

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, and is a protocol that creates a secure link between a web server and browser. Having an SSL certificate is what gives you an HTTPS prefix on your website URL, as opposed to just HTTP – the S stands for secure and means that the data is encrypted, so it cannot be intercepted and gathered by third parties. This will stop a warning from displaying when people try to access your site, and will have a positive impact on your search engine optimisation (SEO), meaning you are likely to rank higher on search engines and get increased traffic, as visitors will not be met with a deterrent.  

Use anti-malware software

Anti-malware software continuously scans for malicious attacks and prevents them from happening. The software works by identifying any potentially malicious files and quarantining them for you to remove manually to prevent harm to your website, data, or computer.  

Create complex passwords

Having unique, strong passwords will help to prevent attacks on your site. Many people often use the same password for everything as it is easier to remember, but this is essentially giving hackers the key to the kingdom if they crack it. Try to use unique passwords for each login you create, and make sure that they are complex. Include lowercase and uppercase characters, numbers, and special characters. Avoid using common words or sequences, such as “password”, “qwerty” or “123456”.  

Keep your website up-to-date

It is important that you make sure that your website’s software, apps and plugins are kept up-to-date. If you use a website builder or hire a developer to create your website, you may not need to worry about this too much as they may manage the updates and security issues for you. However, if you use a builder such as WordPress, then you may need to run updates manually. Outdated plugins may be vulnerable to bugs, glitches, and hackers. You can often set up automatic updates, but you will need to check that your theme will not be affected.  

Hire a professional

The best way of ensuring that you do not have a security breach is to hire an expert to design, build, secure, and maintain your website. As a specialist website design and development agency, our team at DBS can help. It’s important that a website delivers, and you need a team such as ours that you can trust to help you to achieve this. Working with DBS means that your website is in the hands of a solution-focused team of specialists. Using our years of experience, we listen to your needs and goals then illustrate options to meet them. Whilst our maintenance and hosting services will keep your website working as it should, our design and development services will ensure it is performing at its best and helping you to achieve your goals. Having all of these services under one roof and handled by an experienced website design and development agency means your website will not only look good, it will always be up to date and functioning when prospective customers visit. Call 01522 811688 or email hello@dbs.digital to speak to a digital marketing expert at DBS today.