How To Get Your Online Business To The Next Level: Prioritising Website Security
Bulletproof Backups for Your WordPress Website
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With the current pandemic, the need for every business, large or small, to have an online presence has increased manifold. In fact, the latest statistics say that 64% of small business owners have a website today. If you are an entrepreneur, chances are you already have or are considering building your website. So, what does it take to run a successful online business?
While there are many factors that play a role, the most important ones are:
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- A safe and reliable web host to ensure continuous uptime for your website
- An effective SEO marketing strategy to draw more visitors to your business
- A strong security strategy to protect your website from hacks and crashes
- Speed enhancements such as caching for fast website loading on any user device
- Content in multiple languages to reach out to a broader audience
- Easy-to-use contact forms for your clients to get in touch with your business and vice-versa
WordPress offers great support for all of the above, making it the indisputable favourite for anyone looking to do business online. However, each of the aspects mentioned above needs specific WordPress expertise to take your business website to the next level.
To put together this guide, we have partnered with six of the best WordPress technology companies that have transformed the way businesses are conducted online. These include Divi by Elegant Themes, Pressable, WP Rocket, WPForms and WPML – all industry experts in specific aspects of WordPress for business. As a WordPress security solution provider, in this guide, we talk about the importance of website security to build and grow your website.
Benefits of a WordPress Security Setup
With a focus on website design and interface, website security is often the most ignored aspect of a website, and yet, it is the one factor that can bring to naught, all other efforts. Here are just a few of the many benefits of a WP security system:
1. Prevents website downtime
For maximum online traffic and customer engagement, your website must be up and running 24/7. A website downtime of even a few hours can severely impact your online sales and conversions, ultimately leading to loss of business revenues.
A complete security solution ensures maximum website uptime by keeping it safe from hackers and preventing any crash caused by improper updates.
2. Keeps your customer data safe
If you run an e-commerce site, your customer’s details such as payment or preferences are sensitive data, and as a business, it’s imperative that you keep them safe and confidential. A data breach can easily compromise your customer data, expose them to risk, and of course, cause you severe brand disrepute.
A WordPress security system helps keep sensitive data safe and in an encrypted format so that it cannot be used by anyone except you. This way, you ensure you retain your customers’ trust, thus favoring their loyalty and leading to more online sales.
3. Boosts your SEO ranking
A secure website is favored by the Google search algorithm, bumping it with a higher SEO rank. This is because the giant search engine obviously does not want to direct its users to an insecure website.
On the other hand, a hacked or crashed website is often suspended or even blacklisted by Google.
A secure WP security system can boost your website’s SEO ranking and drive more traffic to your website, thus increasing customer engagement and conversions.
4. Improves your online brand reputation
And finally, with the increase in incoming traffic and higher SEO ranking, your website has an edge over other websites prone to downtime and hacks. Considering online users’ lowering attention spans and the short-lived brand loyalty, this is a great advantage for any business to have.
Now that we’ve discussed the benefits of WP security, let’s look at what you can do to secure your WordPress website.
How Easy Is It To Beef Up Your WordPress Security?
There are over 209 different websites trying to tell you how you can beef up your security on your own across 76,40,000 articles. So, you can go through all of them, or you can read the #1 on Google, and try and figure out how to do EVERYTHING yourself or…
You can just use a plugin.
Tools You Can Use To Handle Security On Autopilot
The reason why website owners rely on WP security tools is that they are easy to set up and handle everything so you have time to focus on all the other aspects of your website.
In order to ensure a complete website safety, you need a 2-pronged approach that comprises of:
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- Website backups and restores
- Malware detection and removal
Let’s cover each of the above in detail.
Website Backups
Before we talk about why backups are so critical to website security, let’s take a moment to understand what backups are. Website backups are the latest copies of your website files and database tables – basically, all the contents of your website.
To understand how backups are integral for your business, let’s consider the below scenario –
Your e-commerce website gets hacked or crashes on a Friday evening when you’re expecting your sales to pick up. Your priority, at this stage, would be to restore your website quickly so that your customers are not inconvenienced. A backup solution allows you to do that!
Apart from acting as a safety net in desperate times, here are some of the other reasons on why website backups are an absolute must for your website:
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- It can guard your site against human errors, including those made by your WordPress administrators such as coding errors, accidental file deletions, or improper updates.
- It can simplify the process of migrating your website from one domain to another – through the availability of the latest backup files.
- It can restore all your lost or stolen data, including vital customer records after a successful data breach.
- You can use a backup to test design changes or WordPress updates on a staging website instead of directly on a live site, protecting it from a crash or incompatibility issues.
While there are multiple ways of taking a website backup, we recommend choosing the easiest one – using backup plugins like BlogVault.
Here are some of BlogVault’s features that make it a complete and comprehensive backup solution:
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- Trusted by over 400,000 WordPress websites around the world
- Its incremental backups put a minimum load on your web server resources
- Comprehensive backups of both WordPress and database files – so that you don’t lose any data
- One-click WordPress backup and restore functionality – without the need for prior technical know-how
- Secure and encrypted backup storage on independent locations, including Amazon S3 servers.
- Unlimited on-demand backups and automatic backups that can be scheduled according to your requirements
- All backup and restore operations are performed on BlogVault’s dedicated servers – so that there is zero additional load on your web server
- Up to 90 days of backup history
- Real-time backups needed by WooCommerce websites
- Free and in-built WordPress staging with 1-click merge functionality
- Fail-proof website migration to over 5000 hosting platforms
- In-built website management solution for managing multiple WordPress sites from a single dashboard
Malware Detection and Removal
Hackers target sites of all sizes just so they can cast their net wider on the internet. A hacked website can take days or weeks to be cleaned and restored – driving away traffic and plunging sales. What every website needs is a malware detection and removal tool that regularly scans it for any hidden malware and removes them immediately, when found.
Why is malware detection and removal so important?
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- Keeps your business website safe and protected from hackers and cybercriminals
- Ensures early detection and blocking of malware before they can contaminate your website
- Stops a major data breach that could cause the loss of vital customer records and other confidential data
- Protects websites from suspicious IP requests through a website firewall.
MalCare offers effective malware detection and removal along with other benefits.
Here are some of MalCare’s features that make it a complete security solution for your site:
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- Easy and instant detection and removal of malware variants
- Automatic malware removal
- Malware scanning and cleaning on its dedicated servers – thus putting zero load on your web servers
- Intelligent AI-based scanning algorithm designed with data from over 240,000 websites
- Login page protection with in-built CAPTCHA tool
- Real-time website protection with a built-in firewall
- Easy white labeling and rebranding of services
- Bulk updates of multiple WordPress sites from a single dashboard
- WordPress recommended hardening measures through its dashboard
- Integrated WP management solution for managing multiple websites and user roles.
By now, we hope that you’ve got fair insights on how using the above tools on your website can make your online business secure and get you an inch closer to generating surplus revenue.
For inspiration, let’s look at a case study on how the BlogVault backup tool became a savior for our website!
Case Study – How Backups Saved Us
In December 2018, we received an urgent email from Adam Connell of BloggingWizzard, informing us of the dreaded 404 Error on our home page. What was remarkable was that only the home page seemed to be non-functional. The remaining website pages were functioning as usual.
Our immediate priority was to restore our home page so that Adam and other visitors could continue to engage on our website.
We were still looking over 12 hours of lost content, as the website was going through a major modification. This looked like the right time to use BlogVault’s Test Restore functionality. Since we had the latest backup copies available for instant restore, all we needed to do was test the homepage content before restoring it to the live website.
After some digging, thanks to real-time backups, we could access the latest backup copy, right before the homepage went missing, and restored it without losing any content changes. The best part? The Test Restore feature allowed us to restore the entire home page content in less than 30 minutes – including time spent in figuring out the exact issue that caused the error. Turns out, it was the page’s visibility that had been set to private by one of our team members.
Before We Go…
Every online business requires a reliable and robust security system to protect its website from hackers, crashes, and even human errors. In today’s uncertain times, every bit of peace of mind counts. With the right security solution on your side, website security is one less thing to worry about.
Looking for other aspects and ways to grow your online business? Check out the articles posted by our partners here:
- How to take your business to the next level: choose a robust hosting provider
- How Choosing the Right WordPress Theme Can Level Up Your Online Business
- How to take your business to the next level – Caching
- How to Get Your Online Business to the Next Level: Contact Forms
- How to get your online business to the next level: Translating your website
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