With the number of hacked websites rapidly rising year on year and stricter deadlines in place such as SSL certificates and GDPR, website security is a major concern for both businesses and customers. Here, we’ve outlined a few reasons why website security is so important to your online business;

Trust

Having a secure website is a huge factor in gaining customers’ trust, especially if they are sharing sensitive information. If your website has been hacked and added to different blacklists Google will restrict customers from entering your website so they’ll be unable to reach your products and services. Without establishing any trust, you’ll struggle to attract customers into purchasing your products or services.

Reputation Damage

Since July 2018 every website without an SSL certificate will be marked as insecure which will then likely result in an SEO penalty making it much harder for your website to reach new customers. Once blacklisted, it’s been reported that a site can lose up to 95% of its organic traffic, seriously effecting revenue and sales. This will cause major damage to your reputation with few small businesses being able to recover after being hit.

Reduced Ranks

Once blacklisted with a hacked content penalty from Google, this will cause a drop in your website rankings and seriously affect your SEO campaign. Google recently revealed that more than 80% of hacked websites have been detected and removed from search results meaning that your rankings may not only drop, but will likely be removed from search engine results altogether.

Prevention

It’s not just large ecommerce websites that are at risk – often small businesses make the mistake of thinking that they’re too small to be noticed by hackers however this isn’t the case; hackers will gain access to any website they can with many small businesses closing down from being hacked. 2017 showed a huge rise in infected CMS platforms with the most commonly affected being WordPress, Joomla and Magento.

There are a lot of businesses that get caught out this way by not taking into consideration how important website security is until it’s too late. Prevention is much more cost-effective than a clean-up. A hacked site will seriously impact your business and damage your reputation with website downtime leading to massive revenue loss.

With these points in mind, it’s best to thoroughly make sure your website’s security is always up-to-date before your sales, revenue, conversion rates, traffic and trust ratings are affected! mtc offer a range of services to help get you up to speed with website security including site security audits - get in touch with us online here to learn more.