Websites have changed so much over the years. They used to be static. You’d create the site and walk away. Today a website is an ever-changing, living entity. It requires your time for security, theme and plugin updates, backups, and much more.
Your website is vulnerable to downtime, malicious attacks, and even data loss, so we took the time to outline the top three things you should be aware of when it comes to website support.
Hosting
Hosting services are defined as the rental of space on a server to hold the contents of your website. Reliable hosting is the number one concern in building a successful website.
The average e-commerce site takes 7.12 seconds to load in Internet Explorer 9, an average of 7.15 seconds to load in Firefox 7 and an average of 7.5 seconds to load in Google Chrome. (Source: Hosting Facts)
Potential customers and clients expect to be able to visit your site day and night, so dependability is key. Downtime lasting anywhere from seconds to hours and can affect your reputation. It can prevent purchases and stand in the way of converting online traffic into qualified leads.
Excellent customer service from your hosting provider is a must. If hosting issues affect your website at night or on weekends, you need a provider with a quick response time. You also want to look at their uptime track record to ensure maximum dependability. Lastly, ensure the ability to scale. As your business and website grow, make sure your hosting provider can accommodate the traffic growth.
Backups
You need a good backup solution to protect your website. A single backup could stand between you and sure disaster or building a new website from scratch.
About 70% of business people have experienced (or will experience) data loss due to accidental deletion, disk or system failure, viruses, fire or some other disaster. (Source: Carbonite, an online backup service)
While managing your website is easier than ever these days, it doesn’t mean that something won’t go wrong. Simply working on your website could break a feature at any time. If you delete something by accident you could be in a pickle. And don’t forget about malware and other types of attacks.
Because you are always publishing new content, you should utilize daily backups. Backup your website and website database to remote servers each night ensuring that your website can be recovered in the event of a malicious attack or data loss.
Vulnerability Scanning
Website weaknesses and vulnerabilities can give hackers the opportunity to wreak havoc. Most people don’t realize their website has been hacked until it’s too late. Their web browser might alert them to an issue, Google might flag your site as hacked or harmful, or their hosting provider might take the site offline. By then you’re losing customers and sales. It pays to be proactive and not reactive.
Consider vulnerability scanning to quickly identify security issues and test your site routinely to keep it secure. A dependable scanning service will look for SQL injection flaws, cross site scripting vulnerabilities, dangerous backdoors, and more. The monitoring service will tell you when files have changed unexpectedly and watch for downtime while inspecting all of your source code for malware patterns and signatures. It will also block and lockout hacking attempts. If a change occurs to your website, you’ll be the first to know.
Conclusion
Your website is an open door to your business and, ultimately, you need to keep it that way. Whether your business owns a marketing website or e-commerce site, it’s important to protect it from hackers and technical failures. You don’t want to lose services, lose the sale, or risk a damaged reputation.