Secure your website, don’t neglect it!

I wrote an arti­cle about this around two weeks ago, and web­site secu­rity is para­mount, espe­cially so when leav­ing your web­site unat­tended for a while. I did this an faced the con­se­quences of hav­ing my sites hacked/cracked and I regret neglect­ing my web­site in such a way, as it was such a pain to sort this mess out.

I lost a lot of my Google rank­ings in search results, which hit my traf­fic big-time, how­ever con­sid­er­ing I don’t worry about that much it isn’t much of a prob­lem. How­ever, for oth­ers who won’t know how to fix an infected site, it is bet­ter to totally re-install what­ever script you’ve got installed. For exam­ple, most of my web­sites run on Word­Press, and when my sites became infected as I hadn’t updated the lat­est ver­sion, the best thing to do was totally re-install my Word­Press instal­la­tion. — This takes care of the following:

• You can be at ease and know that what­ever virus which has infected your site has been removed. So as long as you have totally replaced all your files, other than your images in your Word­Press installation.
• You get rid of any back doors the hacker may have injected into your web­site because of any script vulnerability.

Trust me on this, don’t neglect your web­site. It is much eas­ier to first take care of your web­site rather than have to worry about it later, as it will become much harder to ‘fix’ the longer you leave it.