5 Top Tips to Prevent Ransomware Attacks
April 16, 2021
One of the most important functions of a website is to bring clients closer to you. It is the first point of interaction between you and your business.
Over the years, it has become so central to company visibility that now a serious business can not miss the opportunities it presents. When done right, it is a gateway to access all your company resources and all that a company can offer.
Today, we are taking a dive to look at how this central piece of our business lives can turn against us. How can a website work against your business? How can it fail to deliver its mandate?
1. Loss of credibility
Like with our physical connections, the purpose of any website is to speak on your behalf and woo your potential client to buy from you and not from the competitor. Consider it as the first handshake.
Yet, this golden gem in the information age can quickly make you loose all the credibility. In the book The Art of Seduction by Robert Green, the author explains that human beings have a natural tendency to judge others quickly and instinctively based on their appearance. Unfortunately, the website itself as an informational and marketing tool can be subjected to this bias.
A website that looks outdated can make a business appear unprofessional and out of touch with the current business dynamics. This can fast erode trust and credibility with your visitors. He emphasizes the importance of first impressions in the seduction process, to which he says, present yourself in a way that projects strength.
2. Poor user experience
One of the noticeable effects of an outdated website is the slow loading speeds. A slow loading speed can be frustrating to visit, failt to display correctly on modern devices.
This is a sufficient reason for your users to exit the site without any substantial information about you leading to a very poor user experience. Imagine visiting a website that loads like a 10T truck on a hill? It takes ages.
The good news though is that this can be fixed with a simple update of the underlying technology.
3. Resource exhaustion
Ever encountered this error resource limit reached on a website? Yes, this is an example error that is commonly found on an outdated website. The reason being, some outdated technologies or old poorly written pieces of code consume a lot of website resources such as memory and bandwidth. This consumes your allocated resources so fast.
Since all websites are hosted on some sort of a server where other client websites exist, your host puts this restriction on how much of the server resources your website can actually use that you can’t exceed.
This error technically implies that for all the subsequent users, your information will not be available. This can stretch your operations in the case that you have invested in running marketing campaigns and the issue is encountered by your visitors.
4. Security vulnerabilities
One of the things I have really experienced with outdated websites is how easily they can be used for illegal activities since they do not have the latest security patches, making them vulnerable to hacking and other security threats.
A common method used for some WordPress websites is a website redirection attack where on visiting a client website, you are being redirected to another website. It can be a shopping website or another website of their choice.
A compromised website in this state can be used for more serious damages or extensive hacking activities other than just redirect to another website. The destination URL can be used to download malware or other viruses on the users computer.
On a more severe note, the users machine can then be used for activities such as bitcoin mining or as part of a wider botnet used to attack other machines. They can also cripple your website completely by making it inaccessible, putting your business offline until it is resolved.
5. Reduced search engine visibility
Search engines favor websites that are regularly updated with fresh content. This may explain why your old website last updated in 2010 fail to make it to the top spot. This makes it harder for your business to be found by potential clients.
Besides this, many any other factors contribute to a better ranking such as user experience, site loading speed and mobile responsiveness. We can therefore say having an outdated website can adversely affect your search ranking.
How can you fix this?
There is only one way to fix an outdated website.
- Update the website and its resources.
Updating the website resources is the only way if you are looking for a fix. This can include taking some easy steps such as updating the PHP version, optimizing the user interface for easy navigation to more extensive approach of cleaning the entire website that has been compromised by way of hacking.