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Your Website Is Live. Now What? (Why Security Should Be Your First Add-On)

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You built your website. You set up your domain and your email. Your site is live and looking good.

Now what?

For most people, the answer is: move on to the next thing on the list. Launch the social media page. Start writing content. Tell people the site is live.

Website security rarely makes that list. Until something goes wrong.

Here’s what you need to know — and why adding security now is a lot easier than dealing with a problem later.

Websites Get Attacked More Than You Think

It doesn’t matter how small your business is. Automated bots don’t care. They scan millions of websites looking for vulnerabilities, and a brand new site with default settings is exactly the kind of target they find.

Common threats include malware injections that redirect your visitors to harmful sites, phishing pages created on your domain without your knowledge, spam email sent through your server, and content or data being deleted or encrypted for ransom.

None of these are theoretical. They happen to small business websites, church websites, nonprofit sites, and volunteer-run organizations every day.

What Website Security Actually Does

A good website security plan works on two levels: it prevents problems from happening in the first place, and it catches them quickly if something gets through.

At Cyber Grapes, our Website Security plans include a web application firewall that blocks malicious traffic before it reaches your site, daily malware scanning to catch anything suspicious early, DDoS protection to keep your site online during attacks, and automatic SSL certificate management to keep your connection secure.

The Standard plan starts at $5.99 per month. For most small business sites, that’s all you need.

Security and Backups Work Together

Security keeps threats out. But if something does get through — or if a plugin update breaks your site, or a team member accidentally deletes something important — you need a backup to restore from.

Security without a backup is like a lock on a door with no spare key. If something goes wrong on the inside, you have no way back in.

We’ll cover website backups in tomorrow’s post. For now, know that the two work best together, and adding both is easier and more affordable than most people expect.

When to Add Security

The best time to add website security is before your site has any traffic. The second best time is right now.

Waiting until after a problem happens almost always costs more — in time, in money, and in the stress of cleaning up a compromised site. Some attacks are recoverable. Some are not.

Adding security when your site is new is simple, inexpensive, and gives you one less thing to worry about as your business grows.

Ready to Protect Your Site?

If your website is live and you don’t have a security plan in place, now is a good time to change that.