If you are a small business owner, don’t assume that you won’t be exposed to any security issues. It’s a fact that large corporations have higher security risks, so they invest enough for their security to keep up their reputation. Hackers these days often target small businesses because their security is usually poor. An unsecure website can get into serious problems such as compliance issues, customer trust issues, PR problems, etc.
Obtaining an SSL certificate that can give your website a secure HTTPS protocol encrypts the data between your site and your visitors and save you from all these security issues. However, you also need to be aware of the following standard security issues.
Exposed Email Address: you’re likely to collect the email address of your employees and customers, and obviously, you don’t want them to be stolen and sold to a third party. An HTTPS protocol will help you protect this type of information, but this is not enough. You also need to take extra steps of security as well such as updating the softwares daily, using security tools like Sitelock and WAF/DDOS protection, etc. The security tools will help you tighten the security and notify you if your website has any vulnerabilities so you can take action before it causes too much damage.
In addition, you will want to add your email address to your site so that your customer can reach you, but you don’t want spammers to get your email address resulting in an inbox full of unsolicited emails. For this, you can use encryption techniques that will help you post an email address on your site in a format that will prevent it from being harvested.
Out-of-Date Copyright Legislation: Copyright your website and display a copyright notice to prevent your website’s content from being used without permission. Although you need to update your website constantly, it’s essential to update the copyright significantly if you haven’t updated it for a long time.
W3C markup validation Non-compliance: The World Wide Web Consortium is an international body that develops standards for the web. Make sure your website complies with their standards by using a markup validation service.
