Security gets mentioned a lot these days in all sorts of ways; it comes hand in hand with things like privacy (although privacy will be for another blog post). Do you need to be worried with a dental practice website though? Is it the sort of thing you should invest in?
Here at Dental Marketing Expert, we not only have a few stories to tell, we also know a bit about security and what you should do to make sure your site is safe! This is more important than it seems. Not only can an unprotected site leave you wide open to hackers to exploit your site, it can also turn away potential patients when they visit.
We have rescued so many hacked Dental Websites over the years!
I can’t tell you how many times we have had Dental Practice Owners phone us, in a desperate panic, as their site has been hacked and been pulled down by the hosting provider. Not only do they have no website, but in some cases, every contact that has ever filled in a form on their website has been spammed by the hackers. Hackers will try and get into your site in every single way, it’s your job to stop them!
Wordpress is the most popular CMS for designing Dental Websites but it’s also the most vulnerable! Sucuri, a security plugin, reports 90% of its clean-up requests in 2018 were from WordPress. The most common WordPress malware infections are backdoors, drive-by downloads, pharma hacks, malicious redirects, and stolen passwords.
So, what can you do to stop the hackers? The short answer is, you can’t. What you can do though is try and make it really difficult for them to access your site and thus greatly reduce your chances.
You need an SSL certificate on your site. This will encrypt it to a certain extent and make it a lot harder to hack. If you don’t have this, it will also flag your site as a risk in some browsers, therefore if a patient clicks through to your site and sees this red warning, it could send them straight away.
Here are a few tips you can do to help maximise your Dental Website Security:-
- USE STRONG PASSWORDS, generate a secure password (minimum 12 random characters) – there’s a reason this is No.1, it’s the top way hackers gain access!
- Keep Wordpress themes, plugins and Wordpress itself up to date
- SSL Certificate – install one if you don’t have one
- Secure Hosting Provider – if you are unsure, you can always ask us!
- Run a Wordpress Security Plugin
- Don’t login on public WiFi networks
- Make sure you have site backups (daily if possible)
- Check your file permissions
- Protect your computer
- If your hosting lets you, block IPs from certain countries (if your hosting provider lets you)
We know how important Dental Website Security is. We hate seeing dentists get grey hairs from fighting hackers. That’s why we include a lot of security as standard with our Hosting & Maintenance Package. Our hosting offers all of the above plus a load of extra security like Automatic Malware Scanning, free SSL certificates, network-level email scanning and the central UK data centres we use are ISO27001:2013 certified meaning they are PCI compliant (super secure!).
We feel that security is such an important topic, we are welcoming you to get in touch with us if you are unsure about your current dental site’s security measures.
Secure Website Hosting
