Are we speaking your language? That’s no accident. We choose our industries with intent—because no competitive advantage rivals experience.
When we talk about website security with our clients, we hear a range of responses. Some of our clients are knowledgeable and ask educated questions to understand the safeguards and precautions we take on their behalf. Others are asking as a point of due diligence, and are only interested in confirming that we have a set of security guidelines which we follow. And others don’t ask at all, because they’re convinced that their business is too small to be a target.
Read More: 6 Ways Hackers Attack and Exploit Small Businesses
No matter who we’re explaining website security to, one thing is clear: as a web development company, our clients are more reliant on us than anyone else to keep their websites safe. Not only is it our responsibility to build a strong website, our clients also trust us with key decisions that directly affect their site security.
Security threats can come from a range of sources, and responding to them requires a proactive approach. To create the best response, it’s helpful to understand where threats come from, and how businesses can guard against them.
Perhaps the most important decisions a business can make for their website security have to do with their website infrastructure. While any hack is serious, the damage done through infrastructure breaches tends to be more widespread and harder to defend against. Fortunately, guarding against these security threats boils down to a few key decisions regarding your hosting environment, as well as following industry best practices.
WordPress is an open-source content management system, which means that anyone has access to the source code. While this may sound like a threat to some, it’s actually a huge security asset: With hundreds of thousands of eyes on it, no hacking attempt gets very far or lasts very long, and any potential vulnerabilities are discovered and resolved quickly with each update.
However, to ensure your WordPress website stays secure requires some regular maintenance, as well as some care and consideration in selecting and managing plugins.
A good WordPress developer should be guiding you through all of the decisions we’ve already discussed regarding infrastructure and WordPress management. However, there are also best practices your developer should be following to keep your site safe.
Finally, some security measures fall upon the end user—meaning you. As the owner of your website, you will want to be sure you and your team are using it safely. This means educating your team about unsafe security practices, and setting up your passwords and access controls to limit security risks. Your developer should be following these same security measures with their own team.
Website security is an ever-evolving field, with new threats emerging every day. It’s also a field in which true security depends on a range of factors, not all of which can be controlled. Because of this, no good web developer will ever guarantee that a website is perfectly safe from attack. This would be a sign of dangerous over confidence. Anyone making such a claim is likely to be speaking in ignorance, and therefore a liability rather than a source of security.
However, a good developer should be able to clearly explain what the threats are to your business. They should have measures in place to guard against these threats, and they should have a backup in place in case a security breach does happen on your website.
At build/create, our approach to Michigan web design and website security focuses on reducing vulnerabilities so that our clients aren’t easy targets for hackers to exploit. We want to reduce the likelihood that human error will lead to an inadvertent data leak, and make it harder for anyone to accidentally cause a security breach. We also pay attention to website security news, so that we can stay ahead of any emerging threats.
We can’t make any guarantees. But we can ensure that our own business practices and the infrastructure decisions we make on your behalf provide a secure foundation for your website.