Securing your website means defending your web business against threats. Hackers concentrate their efforts on web-based applications such as shopping carts, forms, login pages, dynamic content, etc. Website security not only protects your data, your client’s information, but also your SEO rankings.

If your site is hacked, your website can be quickly dropped from the search engine results. Even a temporary loss of traffic can be painful. There is no way to know how long it can take to recover lost SEO rankings. Your website security policies should be considered as part of your website traffic strategies.

Tips for securing your website:

1. Passwords: Use strong passwords with 8 or more characters and include a mix of capital letters, lower case, numeric and special characters. You can still make them memorable such as this secure version of the word password: Pa55W0rd!
2. Upgrade: If you use third party web applications such as WordPress, pay attention to new releases. When they include patches for security vulnerabilities, upgrade as soon as possible. By the time a security problem is fixed, there are hackers already exploiting it.
3. Vulnerability Scanning: There are services and tools available that will scan your website for known vulnerabilities and weaknesses. This feedback can give website owners and administrators the knowledge they need to tighten up web applications, firewalls and other areas.
4. Backup: Keep backups of your website and databases. If your website is hacked, you will need a recent copy to restore your website from. Better website hosting services maintain daily, weekly and monthly copies of websites on file.