Thousands of websites continue to get hacked on a daily basis, which means that if you run a website of any description, you need to be entirely on top of the security of it. Over half of internet traffic is coming from automated tools like spammers and bots, which is an extremely worrying statistic in many ways. Still not convinced that you need to prioritize website security? Here are just a few reasons why you should change your mind.
Customers Can Be Targeted
If your website ends up getting hacked, it is not just your business that could suffer – it is the personal details of your customers as well. Cross site scripting prevention is just one important facet of protecting your website as a whole. In general, these breaches are caused by automatic hacking tools. When customers find that their data has been breached and your site is exposed, this can end up doing no end of harm to the reputation of your site and everything that you have worked towards.
Hacked Website Numbers Continue to Increase
Attacks on websites are occurring at an increasingly rapid rate, which means that there is an increasing likelihood that your own site is going to suffer as a result of this. An attack does not always mean that your site has been hacked, but it just goes to show you that the risk is there. Ultimately, this should help to spur you into action and take the necessary protective steps.
Loss of Business Reputation
In the world of business, reputation is everything. Increasingly, search engines are working to protect the interests of their users by warning them or restricting access to sites that are deemed to be potentially risky. Therefore, you want to do everything you can to ensure that you do not feature on these lists yourself. When a website is hacked, this is inevitably going to have a big negative impact on consumer confidence as a whole. If a user is worried about a particular site, there is a very slim chance that they are going to come back and visit once again. When a website is blacklisted by Google and the other major search engines, the organic traffic that that site receives drops by as much as 95%.
Fixing Is More Expensive Than Preventing
If you find that your website has been hacked, it can end up being an expensive business to put right once again. For this reason, prevention is far better than the cure. It is the same idea with insurance. While you hope you will never need to use it, you will certainly be glad that it is there if you ever do.
Hopefully, the above list of reasons has gone some way towards convincing you that website security is one of the most important issues that you can focus on as a business owner. Without it, the effects can be devastating and you may even find that they are irreparable.
