How to Check If a Website is Safe?
You may have heard that these days, growing numbers of customers are using a website to check if a website is safe. This is a sign of how the internet is developing from a cyber Frontierland to a place where it generally makes a lot of sense for people to look before they click. This growing awareness of security presents opportunities for companies that are prepared to take it seriously. That should mean everyone, even the tiniest of SMBs.
Why you should care that customers are using a website to check if website is safe
The more people use a website to check if a website is safe, the more chance there is that your website will be checked. For the sake of your business, you need to give a good impression. The alternative is that you may find yourself losing business and have no idea why. With that in mind, here are some suggestions to help ensure that you will look good if someone uses a website to check if your website is safe.
1. Choose your host carefully
There are basically three parts to a website, these are the host server, the content management system, and the actual content. Most SMBs are likely to use a third-party vendor for the hosting. In addition to checking their security standards, it’s a good idea to check their service-quality standards, in particular, their uptime and their page-loading time.
If a site continually experiences downtime or slow page-loads, automatic checkers may see this as a sign that it could have an issue with malware. Even if they don’t, downtime and slow page-loads are never good news. They may cause customers to click out and not only will that have an immediate impact (since you lose the chance to impress them) but could end up impacting your search rankings.
2. Implement HTTPS
At present, it’s unclear how many consumers understand the difference between “plain vanilla” HTTP and HTTPS (the SSL-encryption-enhanced version) but internet authorities certainly do. There is currently a major push for HTTPS adoption and if you understand the internet it’s easy to see why.
The encryption provides a valuable extra layer of security which is useful at any time and particularly important if you’re surfing the internet over an insecure connection, like a public WiFi hotspot. Given the fact that mobile devices now account for a significant percentage of internet use, it’s understandable this is a major issue.
3. Be careful what CMS and software you use
If you have limited resources, then your best option may well be just to go for one of the all-in-one website-building solutions. These provide hosting plus a proprietary CMS. They are designed to be used by people with zero technical skills so the vendor takes care of everything.
If you want to go for an open-source CRM (and the greater customizable these offer), then you need to make sure that you understand what it is, how it works and, arguably most importantly of all, what you need to do to keep it secure. As a hint, whichever CMS you choose, it’s generally a very good idea to make sure that you keep it up to date. It’s also a very good idea to limit the number of third-party add-ons you use and make sure that they are kept up to date as well.
Out of date software not only carries security risks but acts as a red flag that either the company behind it does not know what it is doing or that it isn’t bothering to do what it knows it should be doing.
4. Be careful about your backlinks
Hopefully, you are being very careful about linking to other sites and scrupulously following Google’s criteria for identifying links and dofollow/versus nofollow. If you’re not then you need to clean it up. It’s also a good idea to see who is backlinking to you and try to deal with any unwelcome links, meaning links from questionable sites.
Once you have seen who’s backlinking to you, you have to decide if it’s worth contacting them to ask them to remove the link or whether your only real option is to create a “disavow backlinks” file to send to Google.
In principle, the former should be quicker, because Google can need a few weeks to process a disavow file. In practice, that is not necessarily the case and you will have to expose some contact details to the other party. If you do try contacting the other website and they ask for money to remove the link, the recommended answer is “no”.
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