The thing business owners get wrong about website security is assuming somebody has to pick them.
Nobody picked you. Bots scan every site on the internet looking for known holes, and they don’t care whether you’re a bank or a two-truck landscaping company. You’re an address with a door, and they’re trying every handle on the street.
What It Actually Costs
If your site gets hacked, a few things happen fast.
Google flags it, and visitors get a red warning screen instead of your homepage. Your rankings drop. If you took any customer information, that’s now a legal problem on top of a technical one.
The cleanup is rarely the expensive part. The two weeks of looking untrustworthy is.
The Short List
Real passwords, and not the same one twice. Most break-ins aren’t clever. Somebody reused a password that leaked somewhere else years ago. Use a password manager.
Turn on two-factor. Everywhere you can. It’s the single biggest improvement for the least effort.
Update everything, promptly. Most hacks exploit a hole that was patched months ago on a site nobody updated. “I’ll do it later” is how it happens.
Get the padlock. SSL should be free with any decent host in 2023. If yours charges for it, that tells you something about your host.
Have a backup you’ve actually tested. Everyone says they have backups. Far fewer have ever restored one. An untested backup is a guess.
The Part Nobody Says Out Loud
Every plugin is code from a stranger running on your site. Every one is another door.
That plugin you installed once and forgot? Still there. Still running. Still a way in, long after you stopped thinking about it.
Going through and deleting what you don’t use is free, takes an afternoon, and removes more risk than most paid security tools.
If You’d Rather Not Think About It
That’s fair, and it’s a big part of why we moved most clients to static sites. No database, no plugins, nothing to log into. Very little to attack.
Want me to look at what you’ve got? Call me. I’ll tell you if you should be worried.