It is important to know how to prevent your website from getting hacked. Since you will be pouring a lot of time, money and effort into it you need to take measures to protect it as well. Failure to do so can result in loss of traffic, revenue, create a bad reputation or get you blacklisted in search engines, antivirus databases and spam checker websites.

How to Securely Set up and Access Your Website

Now that you know why it is important to keep up to date with our website’s security, you can either check our our website security services or view some quick tips:

• Keep your website CMS up to date
• Keep your code current
• Avoid hard coding where possible if you are using a third party CMS
• Prevent plugins from accessing too many areas
• Keep your plugins, modules and widgets up to date
• Choose a secure password and a unique username
• Hide or change the name of your login URL
• Hide files from the public using server permissions
• Have a firewall for your website
• Access your website through a wired connection from a trusted place
• Use SFTP or SSH into your website
• Have a strong password for your hosting account
• Remember your passwords or pair a dongle with a secure password platform

How to Update Your Website Safely While at Home

Sometimes it is necessary to catch up on work while at home. There are some basic things that you can do if you are accessing your website through an environment that isn’t being managed by IT or security professionals:

• If you engage in peer to peer connections make sure you trust the person
• Have antivirus on your computer or use a Unix based operating system
• Keep your router’s firmware up to date, change the default username and use a strong password
• Be cautious of the websites you visit
• Be cautious of software or apps you download
• Use a real time software or website reputation management tool

What to Do if You Think Your Website Has Been Hacked

If you think that your website has been hacked you can check to see if there is a result on various online tools. Here are some to help you get started:

• Spamhaus, Barracuda, MX Toolbox – Spam Blacklist (SBL)
• Google, Yahoo, Bing – Search Engine Blacklists
• AVG, Symantec, McAfee, AVG – AntiVirus Website Marked Unsafe

Contact Us for More Information About How to Prevent Your Website from Getting Hacked

We hope that this short article has helped you learn how to prevent your website from getting hacked. Sometimes though, prevention fails and you find out that your website has been compromised. If you are already in this situation help is only a click or call away. If you would like to try to handle this yourself you can use Google’s Webmaster’s Help for Hacked Sites checklist. Depending on the severity of attack, you may need our help. We can also put some prevention steps in place so that the chances of this happening, or happening again are much slimmer. You can check out our website security services or contact our inbound marketing team for more information. We can be reached by phone at 604-779-8438, by email or you can chat with us online right now or send us a message. If you are ready to get started you can also request a free quote via the button below. [wpcb id=”1″]