How to Make Web Maintenance Part of Your Routine ⚒️💻⚒️

Do you have a website? ASave yourself a major headache and spend 15 - minutes a week on website maintenance.

Have you ever gone to a website and seen one of those big red boxes with warnings like “this site may be hacked”?

It's scary, right?

Chrome’s warning system alerts users when a website is no longer safe to visit.

It’s great when you’re the person trying to visit the website, but it can be a disaster when it’s your site that’s been hacked.

And this stuff really happens to real people, in the real world, every day.

It’s a nightmare.

Besides restoring the website to a previously unhacked state, you have to convince Google to remove that angry red box.

Then there is the hit to your reputation.

Think about how much time and effort you spent creating your website and building an online presence.

How do you think one of those red box warnings reflects your brand?

What will customers think if your website has a phishing warning?

It’s not a big deal if you catch it right away. But when it goes on for days or weeks, your domain risks being blocked by multiple security sites.

While it takes hackers and their bots less than a minute to destroy your website, you could spend days, or even weeks, and a fair amount of money to restore it.

Or not.

If you don’t follow a regular maintenance program, you may not recover your files and restore your website.

The good news is I have three easy tips to help you avoid the dreaded red box and recover if bots get through.

1. Do a daily integrity check

It sounds a little techie, but all it means is visiting your website once a day.

This simple step will save you a lot of trouble because the sooner you’re aware of the problem, the faster you can fix it.

And you are on the clock. The longer a compromised website is out there, the more likely every security site will flag your domain as unsafe.

2. Check for security patches once a week

WordPress, and every other CMS, do regular maintenance updates and critical security patches as needed.

They do all the work.

All you have to do is install them.

If you don’t know how, check with the person who built the site for you.

And if you made your own website, you can always check YouTube or talk to me for help.

I have office hours every other Thursday for Business Guild members and I offer a “fix it fast” service that costs $1 a minute for simple website fixes like installing patches.

3. Do daily, weekly, or monthly backups

It only takes a few mouse clicks, or if you’re on WordPress, you can use a plugin to automate your backups. This will save you so much time and aggravation whether you get hacked or just mess up your website trying to change page content.

The frequency of your backups depends on how often you add or change content.

If you write a daily blog post, then daily updates make sense. But if you don’t make a lot of changes, you can get by with weekly or monthly backups.

Note: Be sure to keep historical backups.

This is important even if you rarely change your web pages because a bot can place malicious code on your site months (or even years!) before they activate it.

Unless you know which piece of code you’re looking for, it’s unlikely you will know when your site was infected.

You may lose newer content if you have to revert to a six-month-old version, but at least your site will be up and running.

These three steps are so easy and will take less than 15-minutes a week.

It may take a little longer if your CMS has a big update, but that doesn’t happen very often. In most cases, it’s just a few mouse clicks and you’re done.

That's all I have for this week.

As always, if you would like to chat, you can reach me at pat@thebizguild.com or schedule a coffee meeting through Calendly.

Have a great week everyone!

Pat Hammond

Co-Founder, The Business Guild

Categories: cyber security, newsletter, video, web maintenance, website