Handy Tips for Keeping Your WordPress Site (and Things) Safe During the Holidays

Why? Firstly, the holiday season often brings an increase in cyber attacks. With the increased online activity and potential for vulnerabilities, it is crucial to ensure that your website is protected against possible hacking attempts. This can prevent unauthorized access to your website and the sensitive information it may contain, such as customer data and financial information.

Secondly, a successful hacking attempt can significantly damage your business. If your website is hacked, it can lose customer data, financial information, and intellectual property. This can have significant financial implications and damage your reputation and trust with customers.Additionally, if your website is hacked, it may be taken down or redirected to a malicious site, resulting in lost sales and customer dissatisfaction. Keeping your website safe from hacking can prevent these damaging consequences and protect your business.

Thirdly, a hacked website can be difficult and time-consuming to recover from. If your website is hacked, it can take significant effort and resources to clean up the damage and restore it to its original state. This can result in lost time and revenue and additional costs for cybersecurity experts and damage control. By keeping your website safe from hacking, you can avoid the time and resources required for recovery and focus on running your business. Additionally, a hacked website can have negative SEO implications, as search engines may penalize a website that has been hacked or redirects to a malicious site. Keeping your website safe from hacking can protect your reputation and customer trust and avoid negative SEO implications.

Here are a few more tips on how to keep up with the seasonal demand for your WordPress site!

Require strong passwords

The first step to keeping your site secure during the holidays is to require strong passwords for everyone who accesses it. It would help if you used a password manager to easily create and store different passwords without remembering them all yourself. A strong password should be at least 8 characters long, with at least one upper-case letter and one lowercase letter (and numbers). It should also include both uppercase letters AND lowercase letters, as well as numbers! This makes it harder for hackers—who might try guessing common words from their list of popular passwords—to guess your actual password just by looking at the letters that make up each part of it.

Track Mentions Of Your Brand

Google Alerts is a free service that tracks your brand or name and sends you an email when it finds new mentions. This is an excellent tool if you're interested in keeping tabs on how the internet is talking about your organization. Google Alerts can be used for free, but if you want to get more out of it (and save yourself some time), premium versions are also available.

Limit back-end access

While this might streamline the process and make it easier for you to hit your goals during the busy season, it also opens your site up to security risks. Because it's so tempting to give access to a few trusted colleagues, you need to ensure they understand how important data security is and why they shouldn't ask for access to your site.

Update your plugins and themes

If you're an avid WordPress user, there's no better way to show gratitude than by updating your site during this period! Why?

Firstly, it ensures the security of your website. With the increased online activity and potential for cyber attacks during the holiday season, it is crucial to keep your WordPress up to date with the latest security patches and updates to protect against any potential threats. This can prevent unauthorized access to your website and the sensitive information it may contain, such as customer data and financial information.

Secondly, updating your WordPress can improve the performance of your website. The holiday season often brings an influx of traffic and sales to websites, and it is essential to have a website that can handle the demand and provide a smooth user experience. Updating your WordPress, plugins, and themes can help ensure that your website can drive increased traffic and provide a seamless user experience, improving customer satisfaction and conversions.

Thirdly, updates often come with new features and functionalities that can enhance the user experience and improve user engagement. For example, new WordPress updates may include improved navigation, enhanced design options, and tools for managing and analyzing data. Additionally, updates to plugins and themes can provide new functionality and customization options for your website. These new features and improvements can help to keep your website fresh and engaging, which can help to retain and attract customers. By keeping your WordPress, plugins, and themes up to date, you can avoid these issues and ensure that your website runs smoothly during the holiday season. For the best WordPress security plugins and themes, click here!

Install an Anti-Malware tool

This is one of the most important things you can do to protect your computer from digital threats. Have you ever received a message that your computer will be shut down in 5 minutes if you don't pay a ransom? Or that you need to call a phone number for tech support? You're probably the target of ransomware, and your computer is infected with malware. Malware includes viruses, worms, Trojans, ransomware, spyware, and more. A good anti-malware tool can detect and eliminate them before they infect your computer.

Monitor Your Traffic Like a Hawk

Whether you get a ton of site traffic or just a trickle, watching your website's search engine traffic like a hawk during the holiday season is essential. Customers are more likely to make impulse purchases when they think tons of other people are buying - so it's vital to keep an eye on the trends to see if holiday sales are going well. Google Analytics (most hosting programs have this built-in) makes it easy to check your site traffic any time you want.

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