What is the big deal with web maintenance anyway?

In the online community, your reputation is everything. Your voice and platform are at stake and you can’t afford to damage trust with the people you serve. Losing your credibility may mean losing your audience and being replaced by your competition.

How do you lose credibility?

There are so many aspects to this subject it boggles the mind. In this article I will focus on just a few of the basics. There are many more, but these are some of the ones I’ve encountered so far in my journey.

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Malware: Phishing

By far the issue I’ve seen and fixed the most is when an attacker finds a weakness in a website and installs a hidden phishing page without the site owner ever knowing. The attacker then sends mass spam email messages with a link to this secret page which is designed to steal visitors login credentials.

This has the potential to expose you as the site owner as not being responsible with your company domain. It also has the high potential to add you to a blacklist database. Once you are added to a blacklist database it can be very difficult and time consuming to get your site removed.

Web browsers check these databases to determine if they should issue a warning to the potential customer. It will usually say something like, “WARNING: The site ahead contains malware”

Malware Warning

Daily threats appear in the news:

Just a cursory glance through my security news feed:

  • “16 Year Old Security Bug Affects Millions of HP, Samsung, Xerox Printers”
  • “Fresh warnings over mobile apps containing Joker malware”
  • “Northern Train’s ticketing system out to lunch as ransom ware attack shuts down servers”
  • “A new security Paradigm: External Attack Surface Management”

How do you safeguard against these threats?

While there is no guarantee, there are some best practices to follow to keep your reputation in tact in the digital space.

  • Backups

    The most important part of maintenance is a strong backup strategy. Being able to recover your site after a catastrophic loss could mean the difference of starting all over on a project, or picking up where you left off. Many issues need to be considered for deciding which strategy makes sense. Cost, storage space, how often content changes on your site, etc all factor in, and we can help!

  • Updates

    Reaching the largest possible audience is always one of the main goals of a website. With this goal comes a caveat, crackers. You might have expected me to say “hackers” at this point, but in the hacking world there is a large difference. Hackers use their knowledge for good and to help, whereas crackers use their knowledge for doing damage, usually for financial gain. With your website being out there exposed on the internet, the more popular your site is the more enticing of a target.

    The creators of the technology we use on the internet, such as WordPress, are always looking for ways to improve, and make more secure this tech. Over time security vulnerabilities are exposed in systems. When this happens they need to be fixed and patched, to prevent crackers from breaking in to the system and doing nefarious deeds with your data. In the WordPress world, this is what triggers and “update”, when a security or feature patch is released. A security patch is released when a vulnerability is fixed, and a feature patch is when something is being improved on.

    Keeping up to date on these patches is important to keeping your site secure and clean from infection, and that is what we are here to help with.

  • Monitoring

    The last strategy I will talk about, is monitoring. Even with the best strategy with updates, there is no guarantee of safety. Technology is always changing and we can’t always anticipate the ways where our sites can be exposed. This is why having an automated system to help us monitor when things go wrong can help us stay on top of keeping things fixed as often as possible. The strategy here is to be able to restore to a backup, or apply an update, or make a fix before any of our visitors finds out.

    Web visitors are often able to forgive when things go wrong if it is obvious that you are able to get things fixed quickly. Quick response times to trouble usually results in strengthening your standing in the online world. This is something Thunderstruck Design is here to help you with as well. Our top priority is keeping your presence and brand strong for many years to come.

Want to know more about how Thunderstruck Design can help you with website maintenance?