I like taking care of clients with small businesses. I have a small business (actually, a few of them) and I know I feel good when I know someone is really watching out for me as a business owner. That’s what WP Minder is all about – watching out for you. Protecting clients so they know that if the worst happens and their site is attacked or their host server fails, their website is still in safe hands. They don’t need to panic, because recovery will be quick and simple.
“Why would anyone want to hack my website? I’m not selling anything. I’m just a small business.”
I’ve heard this from my WordPress design clients on a fairly frequent basis. And the answer is usually not what they expected. Hacking is often just a crime of opportunity – it’s usually nothing personal and you weren’t targeted for any particular reason. The hacker was mostly likely just looking for an easy target in order to do one of the following things, just for example:
- Use your website to attack others, like a botnet, a widespread hacking attempt that’s hard to pinpoint.
- To hijack your site in order to present misinformation or deceive search engines.
- To use your site to store the malware that gets downloaded through an email scam.
- Adding links to spammy websites on your site.
- For fun (putting obscenities on your site, for example).
Some of these are pretty easy to recover from, but some will cause you much more grief – your site can be blacklisted, it can be removed from Google search results, or your users’ data could be compromised.
Why Did I Get Hacked?
Having an old version of WordPress or old, outdated plugins and themes provide what can be a ridiculously easy way in, leaving the door open to hackers. That’s not to say that WordPress is the problem – it can happen to Drupal, Joomla or any other content management system.
There’s no absolute way to prevent hacking, but there are some things you can do to reduce the likelihood it’ll happen to you.
And that’s what WP Minder is for. We keep client websites up to date. We take fresh backups that can be restored in case of emergencies. And take basic security precautions to reduce the risk where possible – including running an annual security audit to locate and fix potential vulnerabilities before they become real problems.
I don’t like getting calls from panicked clients who realize too late that they never bothered to back up their websites. My goal is to prevent that in an affordable way, and give clients some peace of mind, knowing that the business website they’ve invested time, money, and effort into is as safe as it can be.
