Signs of a bad website – and how to protect your site against cyber threats
Your website may be the first point of contact between you and your potential customers, but you may lose out on a chance to make a good impression if it has a poor design or security weaknesses in its build. Here’s how to spot a bad website design company and the benefits of sourcing good web developers (like Holly Small Design!) who also have cybersecurity expertise.
Outdated design choices
A bad website design is one that is ‘behind the times’ when it comes to the latest design trends. Perhaps, the site still uses inconsistent or hard to read fonts, jarring colours and cluttered menus that leave visitors overwhelmed or lost. It might even be using low-quality graphics or plugins that don’t display well on a range of popular browsers, and are no longer updated, making them an easy target for hackers to exploit.
Lack of mobile compatibility
Remember that nowadays more people use their mobile devices to browse the Internet than desktop PCs, so if your web developer doesn’t have the expertise in building mobile-responsive sites, your business will suffer. Part and parcel of this, is ensuring your web developer understands the unique complexities of securing your desktop and mobile site against cyber threats, such as providing secure payment gateways for mobile.
Lack of cybersecurity protection
Beware those who fail to put in place the necessary safeguards to protect your data, your site and your visitors. A good web developer will outline the measures taken when coding your website and keep on top of the latest vulnerabilities in traditional web development that can be taken advantage of by hackers. They’ll also use a secure server to host your site and ensure you have an SSL certificate as a minimum.
Benefits of sourcing a good website designer/developer with cybersecurity expertise
A good web designer can ensure your website is streamlined for user convenience by implementing the latest design trends and carrying out user testing. It’s essential to use SEO best practices and not to stuff site pages with large files that will inevitably slow it down, increase loading time, making the website invisible in search engines, or failing to display well with mobile devices.
But what is equally important is that a good web developer understands the threat of ransomware and the importance of cybersecurity in the 21st century and won’t leave gaps in your data security policies. It’s vital that any website is hosted securely and backed up with an experienced and on hand support team to help should a ransomware attack occur. Not only this, it’s also important to ensure that a website’s coding is robust and secure, that vulnerabilities are ‘patched’, and updates carried out routinely – all helping to prevent breaches in the first place. After all, cyber threats such as ransomware, can not only put a site out of action but could compromise sensitive company and user data, which could land you and your company in hot water under the new GDPR rulings.
When you are looking for a new web development and design company, look for a professional team who have an impressive portfolio of previous websites they’ve worked on, ideally for companies in the same industry as yourself and who face the same kind of online threats. This will ensure you get the website design and userability which best represents and protects your company.