No matter what you sell, where you sell it, or who you sell it to, your customers care about website security. We all do! The unfortunate reality of this digital age is that we are all potential victims of hackers, and given just how successful they are at getting the information they need for nefarious purposes, they are not going away anytime soon.
By taking the right protective steps for your website security, you can make sure your business is never an easy target for those looking to steal your and your customers’ personal information.
Website Security and Maintenance Services from Emphasize
Although open platform website design services like WordPress have made it easier than ever to create beautiful, functional websites, they are also difficult to maintain. And if you aren’t keeping the back end of your website up to date, you are leaving yourself open to being attacked. Out of date plug ins and themes are easy ways for hackers to gain entrance into your website.
Operating your small business requires your full attention, so let us maintain your website. Emphasize Design of Calgary offers a monthly website security maintenance program including automated backups, maintenance and monitoring, support within five hours, theme and plugin testing, and handling issues with hosting.
Ensure You are HTTPS Enabled
Enabling HTTPS is a simple way to show customers you mean business about security, which provides them with additional confidence when making a purchase or providing personal information to your website. The marketing benefits of HTTPS can even give your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) a boost, which is always welcome.
- Google and other search engines are in the business of providing secure, relevant search results to their users. Since HTTPS is a highly effective tool available to any website owner, Google would very much prefer that your site be HTTPS enabled.
- In order to encourage more secure websites, Google rewards websites that enable HTTPS by providing those websites with a small but meaningful SEO boost.
The important thing to remember is that HTTPS boosts your website’s search ranking, in addition to its security.
Storing Your Client Information Safely
Here are a few other ways you can help keep your client and business details as safe as possible.
- Keep browsers and operating systems are always kept up to date.
- Ensure all of your computers and networks are password protected (have a professional set these up for you) and require everyone to change their sign in information regularly.
- Make sure you and your staff members all turn your computers off at night to make it harder for thieves to gain access.
- Only email .pdfs. Other types of files carry meta data in the background that people would like to know. Go a step further and password-protect extremely sensitive files.
- Use a CRM. Customer Relationship Management systems not only allow you to store all your customer information in one place, they will help keep data safe behind an additional firewall.
- Virus-scan all USB and external devices before connecting them to computers and networks.
Back Up!!
Websites are actually quite fragile beings that need to be protected from a lot of things. Due to glitches like software upgrades, server failures and algorithm changes, images can suddenly disappear. Content can go missing. Entire sites can completely vanish. As such, we are are consistently backing up and protecting our websites, and are always looking out for safer and better ways to do it. Our websites’ content exists in its most up-to-date format on our server, which is smartly stored in a place where events like natural disasters can’t affect it. We also use external hard drives, which have greatly evolved over the past few years. External hard drives can be huge, with lots holding a complete terabyte of information, which is a lot more than the average laptop.
Emphasize Web Design Services in Calgary
By keeping a commitment to your website security at the top of our priority list, we hope to lay the foundation for a long-term relationship based on transparency and respect. Have a look at Emphasize Design’s portfolio to see what we can do for you and your business.
