Every year there are nearly 10,000 websites banned by Google for being hacked. These websites have lost nearly 95% of their organic traffic and revenue.
Keeping your site secure is now more important than ever. When your website is hacked, Google will blacklist your site, marking it as not secure and removing it from the search engine. This causes your website traffic to drop off.
An IT services company like i.t.NOW can help secure your website so this doesn’t happen to you. We can help prevent your website from being blacklisted as the result of an attack. Blacklisted sites receive no love from Google and won’t show up in search results until the blacklist has been resolved.
Why is Preventing Your Website from Being Blacklisted Important?
Over $80 billion are spent on SEO or Search Engine Optimization, the process for generating organic traffic from Google. SEO is a long term strategy that takes time. Typically at least six months or a year to see results. Businesses are investing large amounts of money because SEO has a high return on investment over time.
Imagine if you spent the past five years investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into your SEO. One day you wake up to dozens of emails alerting you that there is a problem. Your business website was hacked and has lost nearly all of its organic traffic and revenue.
The hundreds of thousands of dollars you invested into generating organic traffic and revenue are now worthless. Understanding this, it is clear that website security is crucial for businesses that invest in SEO. All it takes is one hacker to gain access to the directory and file permissions through your web host and inject malicious code. Once Google catches on that your website has been hacked, they will blacklist your site.
Keep in mind that Google is the most used search engine globally because of the fantastic user experience they deliver to their users. Website security issues deliver a negative experience and put their users at risk. For these reasons, Google takes security breaches seriously and will ban your website.
All is not lost if your website has been blacklisted; you could work with an experienced IT services company to rid your web server of the malicious code. However, it is best that you take website security seriously before this happens. That way, you can protect your site from ever getting blacklisted in the first place.
Here are four ways IT services keep your site secure using website security and website security tools.
4 Ways IT Services Keep Your Site Secure Using Website Security
1. Using Website Security Tools
Managed service providers can use scanning & monitoring tools to ensure the integrity of your website and the web server. Allowing file permissions to monitor logs helps prevent a hacker from gaining access through DDoS attacks. Your IT Services team could create triggers to alert you in the event of a hacker attempting to exploit site features through a brute force attack.
WordPress is a content management system that is used to power 39.6% of websites on the internet. Using website security tools increases the chances to protect your WordPress website from security risks. Every detected threat alerts your managed services team.
2. Web Application Firewall
The web application firewall is used by your managed hosting solution to prevent attempts of vulnerability exploitation.
WAF or web application firewall protects your website’s traffic on the internet from a major security incident, which keeps your website safe from hackers that use cross-site forgery, cross-site-scripting (XSS), SQL injection, and file inclusion.
3. Preventing Security Vulnerabilities Within Your Organization
Cybersecurity training for your team is very important. Stanford University researchers, along with the help of a top cybersecurity organization, discovered that 88% of all website security issues are caused by human error. i.t.Now can help educate your team of employees on the security issues they are faced with to help protect your website from hackers.
4. Encrypt Your Login Pages
Secure sockets layer encryption or SSL certificates are a digital key to prevent direct access to your web server. Every website should have an SSL certificate key. More so, an SSL certificate displays that your website is secure to the user, which helps build trust.
Do Not Risk The Life of Your Business
Website security is critical for any business with an online presence. Businesses cannot protect their revenue and organic traffic without professional website security.
Do not risk the life of your business by overlooking website security. i.t.Now is here to protect your businesses years of hard work generating organic traffic and revenue from Google.
