Keeping Your Small Business Website Up to Date
Websites are often the ugly child in a small businesses marketing budget. They are expensive and often require experts to maintain your website. Once it is up and running many small business owners don’t look at it until it becomes painstakingly obvious it is past time for an upgrade, or when something catastrophic happens. This can lead to expensive cost overruns because fixing a broken system or updating an outdated system can be significantly higher than taking a proactive approach.
Most websites built on CMS platforms like wordpress or joomla have a number of plugins to install to add functionality, however this added functionality can also lead to increased vulnerability to exploits as some plugins are either not built to the same standard as the CMS platform, or become abandoned and no longer maintained. part of the website maintenance is to review the plugins being used, and updating them as well or replacing them with more secure, actively maintained plugins.
Most of the time a few hours of website maintenance every quarter can save thousands of dollars in expenses down the road. not updating your site is rolling the dice in an increasingly chaotic security environment. Attacks on site vulnerabilities have increased over the last several years leading to widespread outages, and while cryptography and security measures have grown, adoption, many cases, has not become widespread.
The reasons behind attacks on websites range from disgruntled former employees, to people trying to find data that is sellable on the black market, to industrial espionage, to someone trying to gain notoriety. hackers can raid a site and destroy valuable data, that, if not backed up properly, can cause financial ruin or huge losses. Stolen data can ruin the reputation of the company as it deals with customers that had their information stolen. for sites that carry sensitive data from financial information, to passwords, and health information, keeping the gates shut, and information secure is paramount.
The basis for cryptography can be very complicated, and hard to understand even for technology experts, because of it’s complicated nature it’s easy to overlook and ignore. many standards are hard to decipher, and making sense of what is necessary, and secure, and what has proven to be vulnerable takes valuable time that many small business owners don’t have.
At CHS Tech Solutions we offer managed solutions for your website. We are not the only provider for this type of service, and there are many types of solutions available. Software is prone to exploits by hackers, and as software ages it becomes more vulnerable. actively maintained platforms release updates and security patches on a regular schedule to fix many of these vulnerabilities. As a managed service provider we go into the website and update the website as new patches and updates become available, making sure that the site doesn’t break in the process.