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You want to make sure that your website visitors and your customers always have a pleasant experience with your site and company. After all, you know how important it can be to develop and maintain a proper reputation with people. For this reason, you try to create quality content on your site, you offer excellent products and services at fair prices, and you work hard to make sure that you are providing excellent customer service. You are adamant about ensuring great communication on social media, as well.
However, how much thought have you put into your WordPress security? Many people choose to use WordPress because of the quality and ease of use, but also because it is supposed to be very secure. Fortunately, WordPress is quite hearty when it comes to dealing with threats from hackers. However, that is only true when it is kept up to date and when other precautions are taken, which will be detailed later.
If a hacker were to gain access to your website, it could cause some serious problems that would have significant repercussions. Let’s look at some of the potential scenarios that could play out for a business like yours.
A Hacker Could Take Personal and Financial Information from Customers
Naturally, this is one of the big fears that many people have when it comes to hackers. They worry that their information is at risk, and that information from their customers could be taken. This is a fear because it is a genuine possibility that happens with an alarming frequency. No one likes the idea of having their personal information or their credit card and bank account numbers stolen. Hackers will often sell this information on the black market, which ends up leading to identity theft.
The Hacker Could Redirect People to an Unsavory or Dangerous Site
Another one of the potential dangers that a hacker could cause for a site is a redirect. The redirect might be very apparent, and all of the visitors who try to get to the site are sent off to another location. However, the redirect might be hidden in a link on your site, and you might not even notice it for some time. However, any visitor who clicks on that link would then head to a site that could be dangerous, and that might even cause their computer to get infected with malware.
The Hacker Could Alter the Look of Your Website
Sometimes, a hacker might want to cause some chaos and have “harmless” fun. They might change the look of your website, change where some of the links go, and even add different images, videos, and text. This can be more than just annoying, though. It can cause some serious damage to your reputation depending on what appears on the site. You will also have a reputation hit because of the hacking in the first place.
The Hacker Could Add New Advertisements
Sometimes, a hacker will add code that will put in ads and popups that you did not authorize to the site. They might seem like legitimate ads at first if you have ads on your site, but you will not get any revenue for them. These can be annoying, and they could even cause an infection to those who click on the ads in some cases.
How Will Customers React?
As you can imagine, if a customer or a casual website visitor realizes that your site is not safe and/or they have had their personal information and financial information taken, they will not be happy. They are not going to want to continue to do business with you in most cases, and they will not have any trust in your company. When these sorts of breaches and hacks occur, it can be a death knell for a business – particularly small businesses – as more and most visitors and customers start looking for alternatives.
In some cases, you might have other sensitive information about the patients, such as their medical records, SSN, and more. All of this information that was entrusted to you to keep safe is now in the hands of a hacker, and this can open up your company to some serious legal problems. Many businesses hacked will end up shutting down because it does too much damage to their reputation.
Of course, this is just one of the potential adverse outcomes. Depending on the severity of the breach, the hackers might have even taken proprietary information and IPs. As you can see, you do not want to have to deal with these types of problems if you can help it. You want to learn how to secure a WordPress site as much as you can against hackers. Below, you will find some relatively simple tips that will be able to help you with hardening WordPress against these types of attacks.
You Need to Prevent These Problems from Happening
Naturally, you need to make sure that you take steps to ensure that you have improved WordPress security for your site. It is crucial to remain as vigilant as possible when it comes to your protection, which should always start with making sure that you have a high-quality, trusted host. You will also need to make sure that you change and strengthen your passwords and your username. Be sure to update WordPress core when needed to ensure the latest patches for any vulnerabilities. You should also make sure that you are updating your plug-ins and your themes, as well. Keep everything up to date and remove any that you are not using.
It also tends to be an excellent idea to choose a WordPress security plug-in that will be able to provide you with some added protection. Choose one that can offer to scan for malware, fixes, and that has a WordPress firewall that you can enable. There is no such thing as keeping your site too safe.