by GRD Creative | Sep 18, 2023 | Business, Content, Content Management Systems, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Website design & development
Rich snippets – also known as rich results – are search results pulled from schema markup code on your website that provide extra information to your listing when your website appears on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). They are not a Google ranking factor, but can give audiences more information about your services, helping to drive more traffic to your site.
How do rich snippets, rich results, and SERP features differ?
Rich snippets, rich results, and SERPs have similar features but are not exactly the same, which can lead to confusion. Lets look at the differences:
- Rich snippets –Google’s official statement is that ‘rich snippets’ are now known as ‘rich results’.
- Rich results – According to Google, rich results include text-and-image carousels, images, and other non-textual elements.
- SERP features – Provide related information on the user’s search query, such as the reviews, videos, and the knowledge panel.
Types of rich snippets
Google supports different types of rich content within its search results. Here are some of the more common ones:
Review
One of the most common rich snippets, the ‘Review’ snippet adds a yellow star review rating to the search results, with additional information about the reviews. Review snippets can appear for the book, course, event, local business, movie, product, recipe, and software app content types.
Product
Useful if you have an e-commerce website, product snippets provide more information to potential buyers about your products, such as stock level, shipping info, and.
Recipe
Recipe rich snippets show information about the recipe on the page, including ingredients, preparation time, and reviews.
Event
Event snippets are useful if you have ticketed events such as concerts or shows.
A note about FAQ and HowTo snippets
Google announced removal of these snippets in September 2023 to provide a cleaner and more consistent search experience for users.
How to get rich snippets for your web pages
For your website to be eligible for rich snippets, you’ll need to add some code called ‘schema markup’ to your web pages that follows Google’s structured data guidelines.
Some website content management systems either already have it installed, or have plugins or modules available that can add the code for you easily. You can double-check this by running a page through the Google Rich Results Test tool. If no markup is present on the page, the rich results test will display the message ‘No items detected’ and you’ll need to add the code with a plugin module or manually. We’d suggest that if you’re unsure, you get a professional company such as Gleneden Ridge Design to add the code for you.
Here’s how to add the code.
- Create the code: As noted above, if you use a popular content management system (CMS) like WordPress, adding schema to your website is as easy as installing a schema plugin such as the ‘All-In-One SEO’ plugin, with which you can deploy the schema very easily without having to write any code yourself.
- If you don’t use one of these CMS systems, you may have to create the code yourself, or talk to a developer to help create and add the code.
- You can use an online service such as the Merkle Schema Markup Generator to create Product schema markup code, and Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper is good too. To generate the code, simply fill out the prompts from the tool.
- When the code’s been created, copy the JSON-LD code; this is the code format Google recommends for schema markup. Remember to only add code for content that’s visible to users and adheres to Google’s guidelines.
- Check and validate the markup: When you have the code, you need to check that it’s valid; if not, your page won’t be eligible for rich results.
- If the code has been generated with a plugin or within a CMS, you can check it by:
- Opening the SEO tool or section on the page that needs checking.
- Next, go to the Structured data tab.
- Then click on Validate, and on the Rich Results Test.
- Clicking this will take you to Google’s Rich Results Test. If it’s valid, you’ll see a green tick. Once you’ve confirmed it’s present and valid, go on to the next section below.
- If you’ve manually added your schema code, you’ll need two checks:
- Check the code is valid before adding it to your website
- Check the code is valid after it’s added
- To see if your code snippet is valid, select ‘Code’ on the Rich Results Test and paste your code snippet in. If it’s valid, you’ll see a green tick appear under the subheadings ‘Detected items.’
- Add the code to your website: Once you’ve validated your code, you can add it to the
<head> or <body> of your website. Once the code is added, you can run the page URL through the Rich Results Test to double-check it’s valid on-site. This time, select “URL,” and enter a URL you want to test. If it’s valid, you’ll see a green tick. - Monitor marked-up pages for performance: monitoring your marked-up pages is important for several reasons: Websites break easily (even if your code is valid, it can break later on), and code may become invalid (old schema markup may become invalid over time and need updating). You can check and monitor your pages with Google Search Console (GSC), and with the Google Rich Results Test tool.
Conclusion
Rich snippets can get more clicks than the standard links that appear in the SERPs, but it largely depends on the content or your website as to whether it’s actually worth putting in the time and effort to implement it. You don’t need to be good at code to get rich snippets for your website. It does take some work to get going, and even once everything is set up, there’s no guarantee that your snippets will appear, so it needs to be judged on a site-by-site basis. If you have an online store, run events, or publish recipes, you’re more likely to have success with structured data like rich snippets than if you have a website that simply displays your services.
by GRD Creative | Jun 27, 2023 | Advertizing, Business, Gleneden Ridge Design, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Web Site Design, Website design & development
There are many ways to market your products and services digitally online. Your website is of course the cornerstone of your online campaigns, and in this post, we outline some of the more popular ways of using online digital marketing to bring prospects to your website and turn them into clients.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The mother of all online marketing. SEO is the process of building-in search criteria to your website and web pages, so that your site can be properly crawled and indexed by Google, Bing, and all of the other search engines out there, and then displayed in organic search engine results pages (SERPs). This includes not only the SEO Title, SEO Description, and Keywords for each page, but also Alt-text for each image, social media thumbnails and data, and to have good descriptive naming for your images, files, and pages. And it’s vital to make sure that you have really good quality content, which these days is more important than your keywords.
Other things that effect your SEO are back-links (links to your site from other sites), and the quality of the domain, content, and usage, such as how often your site or products are mentioned on other sites and online resources, for instance. Website responsiveness also affects your SEO profile; ideally, your website needs to look as good on a mobile device as it does on a desktop computer. If it doesn’t, then your SEO could suffer.
One other facet is Local SEO. This is where you make sure that when you’re creating web pages, content, and posts, and building in your SEO data, make sure that you include your business location and services areas. That way, your more likely to appear to people searching for your services in those local areas.
Business Profiles
Online business profiles, such as Google Business Profiles and Bing Places, are a ‘must’ when it comes to listing your website online. A business profile like this appears on the right-hand panel of Google and contains all of the info that a potential customer may need when they search for a service or product like yours.
https://www.google.com/intl/en_ca/business/
Pay Per Click Ads
Google Ads and Facebook Ads are two examples of Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising. They are setup within the Facebook or Google interface, and work on a auction system, whereby you set a value for your ad to appear whenever someone searches with the appropriate search terms. To win (to have your add appear at the top of the listings), you need to optimize your ad for a variety of factors, such as ad quality, bid amount, search terms, and business demographic. You are only charged when someone clicks on your ad, hence the ‘Pay Per Click’ name.
Email Marketing
With email marketing, also called database marketing, you create promotional emails and send them out to groups of users. These users can be registered subscribers from your own website, or users from a list that you’ve purchased. Whichever the case, the users need to subscribe explicitly to receive your emails, otherwise it’s considered spamming and is looked upon rather gravely.
Email Marketing software comes in a variety of forms and price points. If you have a WordPress website, you can use a CRM such as GroundHogg to create mailing lists and design and send emails. Otherwise, you can use self-contained system such as HubSpot or a mail service such as MailChimp, which has a variety of packages to suit anyone, and is intuitive and as in-depth as you need it to be.
Blogs
Blogs are everywhere on the internet, talking about any topic that you can think off. They are essentially web pages where you can create and display posts about specific topics, relevant to your website, services, products, or area of interest. The great thing is that you can link them directly to your website, and build SEO data to them, so blogs are really worthwhile when it comes to online marketing.
Social media
Sometimes it seems that a new social media platform appears every week, and it can be difficult to keep up. Our advice is to use the platforms that are relevant to what you do, rather than trying to cover everything. Social media doesn’t impact your SEO to a great degree, but it is great for getting the word around regarding your products and services. You can place informational content, instructional videos, help and advice, images, and testimonials on your timelines. But remember to update your content regularly as social media moves fast and your content can get quickly lost among the plethora of other posts out there.
Below, we outline a few of the most prevalent ones:
Facebook
The archetypal social media platform, almost everyone knows Facebook, even if they don’t use it! Facebook allows you to setup personal profiles, groups, and business pages. You can follow friends and businesses, share media, posts, and other content, and communicate effectively and freely with Facebook Messenger.
https://www.facebook.com/
Twitter
Twitter is a ‘micro-blogging’ network in which you can create short posts and content snippets of up to 140 characters and follow and interact with others.
https://twitter.com
LinkedIn
The social media platform of choice for careers, companies, freelancers, and other business opportunities. Connect with and share info with companies, business people, professionals, and prospects.
https://www.linkedin.com
Instagram
Instagram is a visual social media platform. Consisting almost entirely of images, the platform allows users to share pictures and videos with their followers.
https://www.instagram.com
Tumblr
This platform allows users to create a ‘Tumblelog’ of short blog and media posts for their audience. The platform has a more free-form approach than other social media, and is very customizable.
https://www.tumblr.com/
YouTube
The world’s #1 video platform, YouTube allows users to upload, edit and share videos, create playlists, comment on videos and subscribe to other users’ video channels.
https://www.youtube.com/
TikTok
TikTok users can create and watch millions of personalized short videos on the web or on mobile devices. There’s also a version for business with ready-to-use templates, video editing features, and more.
https://www.tiktok.com/en/
Other Social Media
There are a ton of other social media channels out there, and it would be difficult for us to cover them all, so here are a list of many common ones.
Banner Ads, Interstitials and Popup Ads
Banner Ads
Banner ads – also known as display ads – can go on your own website to highlight products or services, on Facebook pages and other social media, or on industry-specific or magazine websites. Obviously, the latter are chargeable, and pricing can be expensive, so pick-and-choose where you going to place your banner ads with care.
Interstitial Ads
Interstitial ads are those that appear in the transition when you’re browsing from one website page to another on the same site. They tend to be full page, advertise a great deal of detail about your product or service, and are generally placed on industry-specific or magazine websites. Be careful to check pricing structure if you’re interested in this kind of ad placement.
Popup Ads
Popup ads can appear on your own site, or on those of magazine or industry-specific websites, at a premium of course for the latter. They generally contain info that could be useful to the viewer, offers, or downloads for instance, and can be set to appear after a time interval, or when a viewer scrolls a certain percentage of the way down a page, or on entrance to, or exit from, a page on your site.
Backlinks
Backlinks are links to your site from other third-party sites, such as partners, business directories, and blogs.
It’s good practice to build up a relationship with your business partners as you can both benefit from links to and from each others websites, but be careful with business directories; many free ones are not worth a penny, so avoid them as they can also be detrimental to your SEO profile. Always research them thoroughly before committing.
And with blogs, with a bit of research, you can find people with interests in what you do who can write ‘guest blog posts’ for you on your site and on their sites where they can mention your name and link to your online resources. In turn, you do the same for them!
In Conclusion
Whatever way or ways that you consider for your digital marketing, make sure you’re aware of the pricing, time, and effort that goes into putting a marketing campaign together. Many of the above methods are free, and can be linked together for increased coverage, however, they can take up a lot of your time. Putting together a marketing campaign, and maintaining it can be taxing on your resources, but it can also be very effective and bringing visitors to your website, which of course can turn into prospects, who can then turn into clients, so it’s very worthwhile.
Remember though, that we are here to help, and if you need any advice, guidance, or assistance in putting together your ads, marketing campaigns, and maintaining them, please get in touch with Gleneden Ridge Design, based in Salmon Arm, BC, as we’re very happy to help.
by GRD Creative | Jun 1, 2023 | Responsive Design, Web Site Design, Website design & development
Many people who use the internet on a daily basis may have never heard of ‘responsive’ web design, or have never heard about a particular site’s ‘responsiveness’, but what is a responsive website, and how do we make one? If you’re web-savvy, you’ll probably already know, but if not, then read on and we’ll try and shed a little light on the mystery.
Traditional Web Design
In those olden days, websites were often either static websites built with HTML, or database-driven sites created with non-responsive Content Management Systems. This way of building gave the site a fixed (or static) width, meaning that if the site was built to a width of 800 pixels, it would always be 800 pixels, irrespective of the size of screen that it was being viewed on.
As mobile technology began to take hold, this obviously led to problems as websites were bigger than the screens they were being viewed upon, so users had to zoom-in to read text because it was too small, zoom-out to view the whole page, or scroll inconveniently in all directions to search for what they were looking for, which of course rapidly became tiresome and irritating, leading to a loss of views and users.
Alternate Mobile Versions
The fix for this back in the day was to have an alternative version of your website, formatted to the width of the typical mobile device. A user would browse to a website, and a script on the entrance page would detect whether the viewer was using a desktop computer, a mobile phone, or a tablet. The script would then redirect the user onto the appropriate version of the website.
This seems simple enough, but it had issues. Some website elements would not work on the mobile versions of the website because of their static nature, mobile devices had limited support for some website technologies, and of course, you had multiple versions of your website, so whenever you made a change to your main site, you had to make sure that you changed all of the others too, so it could rapidly become a management nightmare.
Responsive Web Design
This is where responsive design comes in. Responsive design came into being as a solution for the alternate mobile version management nightmare. With responsive design, page widths, columns, rows, images, and graphics are set with a percentage width, rather than a pixel width, So if a page width is set to be 95%, then it will always be 95% of the width of the screen that its being viewed upon. Similarly, if that same page has two columns, one set to 33% and the other to 67%, then the left column will always be one third of the page width, and the right will always be two-thirds. And if an image in the right column is set to be a 50% width, then it will always display as 50% of the width of that column. Simple!
Additional controls also make life easier for viewers of responsive sites. If a site has 3 columns when viewed on a desktop computer, it’ll probably have one column when viewed on a smart phone, with the content logically layered below each other; very nice!
Text is a little different. Text was normally set to have its height measured in points, which is traditional in typography, but using points, text could look too small when viewed on a smaller screen. Instead, we use a pixel measurement, which proportions to the size of the screen much better than points or picas!
For those who are interested, here’s an example of some of the code that makes a modern website responsive:
- Xvw measurement: (vw = viewport width – viewport is the browser window width), which is a percentage scale, so 8vw is a text height that is 8% of the browser window width, so it will always stay to scale.
- Cascading Style Sheet media queries: you can use cascading style sheets to detect the screen size and then apply the appropriate CSS styling to the text for that screen size. Here’s an example:
- /* If screen size is 728 px wide or more, set font-size of <p> to 18px */
@media screen and (min-width: 728px) {
p.example {
font-size: 18px;
}
}
/* If screen size is 727px wide or less, set font-size of <p> to 12px */
@media screen and (max-width: 727px) {
p.example {
font-size: 12px;
}
}
That’s a simplistic overview of what responsive design is and how it works. Obviously, there’s a lot more to it, and if you search online you’ll find a vast range of responsive web design resources, and we’ll cover some other aspects of web design in future posts.
For more info on creating a responsive design, contact Gleneden Ridge Design.
by GRD Creative | May 30, 2023 | Advertizing, Best Practices, Business, Content, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Website design & development
SEO is often misunderstood by many people, especially by those less tech-savvy as it can get quite technical. SEO questions range from basic to advanced level, and this article aims to answer some of the most common ones.
1. What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of tactics and strategies designed to increase the organic traffic to your website – Google cannot show your content to people looking for your services and products if it doesn’t know about your website. This typically means improving your website’s visibility to search engines (like Google or Bing) by creating content that your customers and prospects are searching for, and building in the technical SEO aspects, such as keywords, SEO descriptions, featured snippets, title tags, and alt-text so that the search engines can actually find, scan, and display your pages and content.
2. Why Is SEO Important?
Your prospects can only find your website and content if you have the correct SEO pieces in place. Social media has limited organic reach as most social media content is not picked up by search engines, and paid ads can become expensive. That’s why Search Engine Optimization is the most cost-effective means of driving traffic to your website. SEO drives traffic that is interested in what you have to offer, and provides your prospects with the information they need to make an informed choice.
3. How Does SEO Work?
Prospects use search engines like Google to answer their questions; the task for these search engines is to find the best answers to each question. Search engines use special code called robots (or bots) that crawl your web pages and indexes all of the written content, categorizing and listing it in their database, then when someone searches for that content, the search engine pulls the relative information from it’s database and lists your website info and links in a Search Engine Results Page (SERP), along with all the other websites it can find that contain similar content.
SEO specialists claim that Google uses over 200 ranking factors to decide whether a particular page is the best answer to your question, and these ranking signals are weighted by machine learning (AI). For any given SERP, the weight of each ranking signal may be different, so fine tuning content and technical SEO is vital to continued SEO profile growth.
4. What Are The Main Categories of SEO?
SEO can be broken down into three categories:
- On-page optimization
- Off-page optimization
- Technical optimization
On-Page SEO refers to changing the content of a web page to provide better searchable information. This includes keyword research, keyword placement within your page and content, and adding/editing HTML tags.
Off-Page SEO refers to optimization that occurs outside of your webpage, for example, the creation of links from external sources to your site. These are called backlinks.
Technical SEO refers to improving technical aspects of a website, such as site speed, crawling, and indexing.
5. Why Are Backlinks So Important?
Webmasters are in control of on-page and technical SEO, but not necessarily backlinks. Good quality backlinks are basically links to pages on your website from reputable external sources. The more quality backlinks you have, the more Google will ‘trust’ you.
Good quality backlinks come from reputable websites such as respected newspapers and organizations. Free listings and such like are categorized as poor quality, so never sign up for these.
As your website gains more quality backlinks, Google trusts it more as a general authority. As sites gain authority, Google becomes more and more likely to give it visibility.
6. Should Backlinks be Purchased?
Its tempting to buy backlinks; this is known as Black Hat SEO. It’s quick and easy, but too many of these can end with your site being demoted as it goes against Google’s guidelines, so don’t take the easy road!
The best way to get backlinks is to write great, informative content of such interest that other websites naturally link to you as their resource.
7. How Long Does It Take For SEO to Start Working?
For a new website, it can take from six months to a year before SEO results in increased organic traffic, mainly because new websites lack quality backlinks.
Established websites with a strong backlink profile can increase their organic traffic much sooner because Google already trusts these websites.
8. Should I Use SEO, Paid Ads (Pay Per Click or PPC), or Both?
It depends on your priorities and available resources & budgets.
SEO has a higher return on investment than paid ads, but take longer to appear.
Paid Advertising is much quicker, but you can often pay dearly for it.
- If you need quick sales, use paid ads.
- If you can wait for a few months, use SEO.
- If you have the resources, time, and budget, you can combine SEO and paid ads to build a strong profile in both categories.
9. What’s The Difference Between SEO and Inbound Marketing?
Your prospects encounter your website as organic, paid, social, referral, or direct traffic. SEO is only responsible for increasing organic traffic. SEO stops once traffic hits your site.
Inbound marketing integrates SEO with paid, social media, referral, and direct traffic. Inbound Marketing continues after a prospect hits your site to try and nurture them into becoming a client.
Contact Gleneden Ridge Design for more information on SEO and digital marketing.
by GRD Creative | Feb 15, 2022 | Best Practices, Gleneden Ridge Design, Security, Website design & development, WordPress
How to make sure your website is secure
A great many websites get attacked or hacked every day, and a large proportion of those are against small business websites! This only goes to show that it’s not just the bigger organizations and companies that become targets; small businesses are targets too, and sometimes through ignorance that they just think they’re too small to be noticed, and some because they just don’t have adequate security safeguards in place.
Here we’ll outline a few things that small businesses can do to secure their online presence from cyber-crime.
Website Security Threats: An Overview
Websites get attacked in many different ways, so here’s a brief overview of the most common security threats.
Spam
Ever been contacted by a foreign entrepreneur, asking you to claim money on their behalf> That’s a typical spam gig. Easy to spot and harmless; most of us simply ignore this kind of junk nowadays.
But sometimes, spam can be more insidious. One common tactic is for a hacker to find your unshielded website or blog, then setup bots to flood your comments with links to their site, attempting to create backlinks to boost their own web presence. This can be very harmful to your own website presence because Google’s own bots can detect these malicious links on your site and demote it – or even black list it – in their listings. Additionally, the hacker’s links may contain phishing links or other malware, which in turn will demote your rankings even further.
They also make your site look really trashy, often driving away regular visitors, thus potentially losing you business.
Whatever the case, you’ll find your SEO rankings sinking like the Titanic if you don’t take steps to mitigate this behaviour.
Viruses and Malware
Malware and viruses come in lots of varieties, and such can be a massive threat to your website.
Viruses and malicious software tend to be used to access your private data, or to utilize your own website hosting to run services on behalf of a hacker. You site can be hacked, have monetized ads placed upon it, or be replaced with a completely different site of the hackers making. Hackers can install malware into your web server and/or computer in a variety of ways, such as phishing emails, URL redirects, and directly hacking an unprotected site.
The single biggest thing here is not to click on anything in an email or message that looks unfamiliar or weird. Educate your staff and clients on the importance of online and email security. Remember that both you and your customers are at risk from anyone who finds a way to exploit your website. You could find that your clients are coming after you because they’ve lost money through something that they clicked on in your website, which ultimately is the business owners responsibility to keep secure.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks
DDoS attacks block access to users trying to visit a specific website. Using spoof servers and IP addresses, the hacker overload a particular server or website with a massive amount of random traffic, tying all the resources of the server, crashing your website.
Hackers use this technique for various purposes. Once your server is offline, it becomes vulnerable since it’s security systems are down, and the cyber criminal can plant all manner of malware on it, ready to infect an unwitting public. For this reason, web service providers offer additional protection, such as cloud security, which can block security loop holes until the website or server is back up and running. Hackers in the employ of rival companies can also use this technique to crash the web services of their competition, making them look unprofessional.
WHOIS Domain Registration Database
When you buy a domain name for your website, you’ll be required to release information about yourself. This information is recorded and is available publicly on the WHOIS data database. This database contains personal information, your domain, URL, name servers, and other web-related info that hackers can use to search for websites and servers that may have vulnerabilities.
Of course, being publicly available, there’s not much you can do about this, but it does reinforce the case that you do need to keep you website and web server secure.
Search Engine Blacklists
As mentioned above, having your site hacked can hit your Google positioning and diminish your SEO substantially. And if internet users report your site as ‘spammy’ or malicious, it could be added to a search engine blacklist, which is an extremely difficult corner to get out of.
The best way is to avoid being reported in the first place. Create a clean, safe site for your website users, make sure both your website and your web server and/or hosting package is secure, and always use a reputable internet service provider, such as Hostpapa.ca.
Keeping your website safe
You can’t just assume that your website is secure. It may be hosted on a supposedly secure host, with a professional ‘small business’ hosting package with a ‘all-in-one’ security add-on pack, but if you haven’t taken steps to configure your cloud-based firewall beyond the basics, or set up spam protection, or install a WordPress security plugin, then your website is probably vulnerable to some kind of attack. The Internet moves quickly, and even if you have done all of these, you still need to keep everything up-to-date, and under continuous review.
It’s complex, but what are the most important steps to take to improve your security?
Use HTTPS instead of HTTP
One of the top priorities on your security list should be making sure that your website loads using HTTPS (Hyper Text Transport Protocol Secure), rather than the unsecure HTTP (Hyper Text Transport Protocol).
HTTPS tells your website visitors that they’re loading the actual website that they want from the correct server that it’s hosted on, and not a hijacked or hacked version. Without using HTTPS, a hacker could potentially edit info and data on your website or page, in order to allow the hacker to harvest personal data from your website viewers, such as passwords or credit card information.
Your website visitors will also feel much safer, knowing that your site is loading over a secure channel, as they will see icons similar to this in their web browser address bar:
You can improve your security by using an SSL (secure sockets layer) certificate. These encrypt the communications between the server and the web browser viewing the website, adding an additional layer of security to keep your website safe.
With eCommerce websites, SSL is mandatory since your dealing with private info such as credit cards, but even if you’re not selling online, using HTTPS protocol with an SSL certificate is good practice, and many web hosting providers, such as Hostpapa.ca provide some kind of SSL for free with many of their packages.
Since Google recognizes and promotes using this secure transport protocol, using HTTPS will also improve your search ranking.
Keep your website software up-to-date
Website software needs updating as often as your computer does; sometimes even more so! Always make sure you have the most recent version of WordPress, DotNetNuke, Joomla, or whatever CMS you’re using, and your modules, plugins, CMS, and theme too.
Why keep everything up-to-date? Well hackers use bots to scan for vulnerable websites. And older software can have weak points that make it easy for hackers to exploit your site. And you may not know anything about it until it’s too late.
If you’re unsure about how to manage this aspect, contact us and we can advise and assist you.
Choose a website hosting plan with security
We always advise that you use a recognized and recommended service provider with good reviews, so do your homework. Doing so will ensure that you’re using the most secure hardware and software to host and safeguard your website. But even with the best hosts, there are some things to watch out for:
Shared hosting for instance. Shared hosting is where the service provider hosts a range of websites on virtual servers, all located on the same physical server. This makes it cheap, but not necessarily the best choice, since if one of the other sites on the server gets hacked, the cyber-criminal could potentially hack the rest of the sites on the same server much more easily than if they were located on different physical servers.
Cloud or VPS (Virtual Private Servers) are similar to shared hosting, but much more secure and still have a reasonable price port, so those types of plans would be a better option.
Change your password regularly
Not surprisingly, the best hackers can crack passwords really quickly, sometimes within minutes. That’s why you need to change your password regularly. You can use password manager software to help manage and secure your passwords, but however you manage it, change your passwords at least every 6 months at least, if not more.
You should also enable two-factor authentication on your host, website, and any associated services. In fact its mandatory with credit card processing services such as Stripe. 2-factor authentication requires that you confirm a login on a separate device such as your phone, thus adding an additional layer of security.
Secure your desktop or laptop computer
Desktop computers are typically infected by viruses and malware when phishing emails are opened or malicious sites are accessed. This can open up your private information for hackers to steal, which is why you need good antivirus software on your computer. If your own PC is insecure, when you login to your website, sensitive data can be immediately accessed by a criminal in order for them to utilize your website for nefarious purposes without you knowing.
And if you’re a business owner or IT manager, make sure that your staff are adequately trained and aware of what they should and shouldn’t open on their work computers.
Monitor your security
Its difficult to block every attack online, but there are tools and resources available that allow you to monitor your website. You can run audits that will give you a cross-section of your website, give you security info, and highlight vulnerabilities. This in turn means that you can take steps to prevent an attack before it happens, or be alerted when an attack is in progress so you can stop it and fix any damage.
There are a great many security plugins available for WordPress, and for other CMS users there are also a range of endpoint and cloud security software available to help protect and monitor your site.
User Security: Limit access
Many security issues arise due to human error – someone didn’t lock a PC before they left, or used an application they shouldn’t have – and one of the best ways to prevent this is to limit user access. Users should only have the permissions they need to do their job, and if someone is not meant to be a website admin, don’t give them the roles to do so. It’s as simple as that!
Having multiple users accessing your systems can lead to a lack of responsibility, and therefore potential security issues. Therefore, every user should have their own login credentials; you’ll find your staff much more accountable with this in place.
Backup your website
This is a no-brainer; always back up your site. Backup before you run an update, after you run an update, and at least every week, if not every night. Most hosting services come preloaded with some kind of backup solution, or have it as an add-on. And CMS software like WordPress has multiple options for backup plugins; we recommend and use Updraft.
Change default settings
Hackers use automated bots to find vulnerable sites, and one kind of vulnerability is a site with default settings. So when you’ve installed your website software, whatever it may be, make sure you change some of the defaults:
- Comments settings
- User registration role settings
- Information visibility
- File permissions
Restricting file uploads
In many cases, your website will need to have forms or functionality where users can upload their own files to your website. And as it’s more-than-possible for one of these users to be using a computer that may be infected with some kind of malware, this functionality should always be treated as if it was a potential threat.
You can help mitigate this risk by either restricting file types (in your CMS settings you’ll be able to customize the ‘allowed file types for uploading’ settings, so that only recognized, legitimate file types can be uploaded by users) or you can use third-party software or plugins to create a secure file upload system with virus protection and security.
Website Security: In Conclusion
Security of your website should be one of your top priorities as everyone is at risk, and even if you do take every measure, you could still be affected in some way, so you need to be vigilant. By employing all the tools available, you may not be able to make your web site totally secure, but you can make it difficult to crack; hackers are often looking for a quick result, and if there’s some security, it can be a deterrent. When you setup your web server or hosting, and build your website, make sure you put at least some of these ideas into place, and if you’re unsure, hire the services of someone who does know something about online security.
Recent Comments