If you are a small business owner doing business online, you need to think proactively about protecting yourself from web site disasters. Losing your web presence to any kind of web site disaster would have the same impact for most small online businesses as an earthquake would have on a brick-and-mortar business. There are three key things you can do to prevent website disasters from occurring with your website:
1. Test Your Website
While it is important to test your website to make sure everything is operating properly, many business owners make the mistake of testing on their live site instead of using a development site for testing. If you test on your live site, you might be the one who breaks it. However, by testing on a development site, you can still thoroughly check the operation of your site, and run test orders to make sure transactions go smoothly, without running the risk of bringing your site down for however long it takes to fix it.
2. Make Data Recovery Easy
If something does happen to your website data, it can be frustrating and difficult to recover from quickly—unless you have local backup copies of all your web site code. Your backup process should also include maintaining all of your source files for your graphics. As well, even if you are a small operation and don’t think it’s necessary, get in the habit of doing nightly backups of everything—or it’s possible you never will be anything but a small operation. Good web disaster practices are essential for ensuring that you are capable of meeting and exceeding your customer’s needs.
3. Protect Your Site
There are several steps you need to take to protect your website from being infiltrated by hackers. What you need to remember is that when you make things easy on you, you make things even easier for hackers and other criminals. It might be more convenient to have every system using the same password, or to let all employees log in under your account, but it is dangerous. You should have strong, unique passwords for each system. Login information should be secured and only shared with those who need to have access.
You should be changing your passwords often. Never rely on vendor-provided passwords to protect you. Always change it as soon as you receive the login information. You should change your passwords any time someone leaves your employment, too, even if you think they might be the most trustworthy person. The strength of your password is also important. 4-letter passwords are ridiculously easy to crack; 8-12 character passwords that are a combination of letters, numbers, and symbols afford you the most protection. And no matter how tempting it is, don’t store your passwords in your browser.
A few small steps and inconveniences now can save you a world of hurt over the long run and protect both your business and your customers.
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Photo by irene.
