Probing Your Site for Security Issues – 4 Ways To Follow

As a business owner, customer satisfaction needs to be your top priority. This can be accomplished by providing outstanding service and products. But it’s not only about making customers happy, it’s also about not making them upset—and especially not causing them harm.

In the digital age, it’s now easier than ever to accidentally be responsible for something bad happening to consumers. Your business needs a website to stay competitive in today’s marketplace. However, websites can be hacked—exposing your most loyal users to nefarious parties. There are countless examples of this happening over the past few years.

The Equifax breach in 2017 affected over 100 million people’s data. In fact, over 40 percent of popular websites are considered “risky” by Menlo Security. These are often some of the biggest organizations in the world, which have resources to commit toward cybersecurity.

How To Probe Your Site for Security Issues?

How can owners of small- or medium-sized businesses keep their valued customers safe? Here are some ways to probe your site for security issues.

#1. Use a Website Scanner

If you already have an established website and want to probe for vulnerabilities, you should consider using a site scanner. There are many types of issues and attacks that can happen to a website. For this reason, there are quite a few services that offer users the ability to scan for problems.

These are often free, which means there’s no excuse for not doing it. All you must do is paste your URL into the designated space and let the tool scan your site for issues. It’s not a bad idea to use this service for other websites you frequent on a regular basis—as it can uncover potential dangers there too.

#2. Build Your Website with a Reliable Service

Keeping your website secure needs to start at the earliest possible stages. This means in the construction of the site itself. Not all web services are created equal. Some CMS providers are inherently more vulnerable than others.

A good website builder will update often to continually stay ahead of potential security issues. It will also not offer you plugins and widgets that are known to have bugs; and if new bugs are discovered, patches should be released in a timely manner.

#3. Stay Current on Potential Threats

Even if you have the best website provider, you should still do your own independent research into online threats. This doesn’t mean you need to know the inner workings of all your site’s code (although, this won’t hurt!).

Nor do you need to be an IT expert to understand the basics about how certain online threats can affect your website. Do an online search every few weeks to stay current. It should be noted again that your customers’ security needs to be the top priority.

No matter how well you stay on top of online security trends, you will always be at risk. For this reason, don’t store customer data in places that might be vulnerable.

#4. Don’t Give Out Your Login Information

Online threats don’t only come from external sources. You can get burned from people within your organization as well. Sometimes this can be intentional. For example, a disgruntled employee might delete a small amount of code from your site.

This can make your entire site unusable until it’s restored. But this doesn’t have to be done with ill intent. People make mistakes. It’s not uncommon for an employee to accidentally damage your site’s code, or expose your site to a threat in some other way.

You need to be diligent about educating your staff in order to limit the risk of this. But above all, don’t be too liberal about who you give the login credentials to your website.

You need to do everything in your power to keep your website secure. Failing to do this will cost you legitimacy in the eyes of your customers. Additionally, it can cause real harm to the people who support your business. Heed these tips for keeping your website safe.