Protecting Your Website: Why Your Small Business Website Needs Security Protection

For small business owners their website is often a key part of their business, so it is important to protect it.  Hackers are becoming more efficient on how they tap into websites, often now by leveraging automated bots that crawl the internet to exploit websites shown to have vulnerabilities. This means that websites are at risk, whether you are a small business or enterprise corporation.  Large companies, often already have security groups and measures in place across the organization, but for small business owners it is their responsibility to protect their business, both online and offline. GoDaddy, the world’s largest cloud platform dedicated to small, independent ventures offers a variety of website security products to help you protect your online presence.

Small business owners and entrepreneurs often need to spread their time and focus on all areas of their venture, so they may not pay as much attention to protecting their online presence.  After having created a website, security features can easily be added on that can help protect your website against cyber attacks. These attacks can include data breaches and malware attacks that can harm your website, your search rankings and most importantly, your customers, if not dealt with quickly and efficiently.  So how can you help ensure that you are taking steps to help protect your website?

Here are some tips to help protect your website:

• Choose a Protection Service: Every website is at risk of malware attacks, since cyber attacks today are often automated. You have already put in the effort to build your website, adding website security is just another step to helping to ensure that your website is protected. You don’t have to be an expert in website security, and can choose a protection service with ongoing monitoring, such as GoDaddy Website Security offering. With Website Security, daily scans take place on your site, and should there be a problem, you get a notification right away with the suggested best course of action.  If there’s an issue our auto removal tools can’t fix, our security experts will repair it manually – at no additional cost to you.
• Choose Strong Passwords: Choose passwords that are considered strong with a combination of letters, numbers, characters and paraphrases. You may also want to consider using a password manager assist tool, as it can create strong passwords and remember them for you.  You’ll also want to keep your passwords updated and not use the same password for all your accounts.
• Secure Online Payments: If your small business has an online store feature, you are probably accepting payments online. Customers want to know they are submitting their information to a secure site, so your website needs to have a safe seal of approval. With a trusted SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate you are protecting the transmission of your customer’s data from your website. When you see the prefix https:// or the lock icon next to the url address, you know that the site is more protected. Having this certification can also help improve your Google Search ranking to appear higher in search results, making it easier for people to find your site. In addition, starting in July, Google Chrome will start to clearly mark websites that do not have SSL Certificates as ‘Not Secure’ in the address bar. GoDaddy offers a variety of different SSL certificates to help meet your needs.

You can never be too cautious when it comes to cyber security and working to protect your online presence.  By following these tips you can take proactive measures to help protect your website and build trust with your customers.

Written by Jill Schoolenberg, VP and Country Manager GoDaddy Canada