What is the risk if the website is not maintained?
The answer is it depends on your risk profile and how critical the website is to your business operation.
If you fall into one or more of these conditions, then your risk profile is low if your website is:
- Not mission critical
- Not integral to the buyer’s journey or part of the marketing mix
- Not used for e-commerce
- Not collecting any personal identifying information
- Not required to generate leads or promote your brand proactively online
- Not storing or provide access to important or proprietary company information
- Not using landing pages related to third party Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or print adverting
- Not used in connection with internal business processes or connected to your company network
- Not in a regulated industry (finance, healthcare, etc.)
If you fall into one or more of these conditions, then your risk profile is medium if your website is:
- An important part of your marketing mix
- Integral to the buyer’s journey
- A major source of leads
- Using a form that collects and stores personally identifiable information
- Using a landing pages related to third party PPC or print adverting
If you fall into one or more of these conditions, then your risk profile is high if your website is:
- Mission critical
- A conduit to an e-commerce transaction
- The primary source of leads, registrations or subscriptions
- Connected to or contains important or proprietary company information
- Using landing pages related to third party Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or print adverting
- Using one or more forms that collects and stores personally identifiable information
- Connected to other business processes or systems on your company network
- In a regulated industry (finance, healthcare, etc.)
A discussion about maintenance would not be complete if we did not discuss malware.
A malware attack is where malicious software invades your websites software and executes unauthorized actions that can affect the design, corrupt the database, make the site inaccessible, pirate information or perform other malicious actions. Maintenance in combination with antivirus software is the best defense against malware.
Malware and computer viruses are serious because they can:
- Take a website down resulting in reduced revenue and lost leads
- Slow down your website’s performance, frustrating users
- Take many hours of a development time to troubleshoot and scrub (remove) the malware
- Cause your website hosting company to temporarily kick you off the server (isolate you) to protect the other websites sharing the same server
- Cause your website to continuously display error messages compromising trust in your brand
- Cause Google to shut down your Google Ad campaign resulting in fewer leads or lower revenue
- Lead to search engines or browsers may display warning messages, and in worst case scenario, blacklist the website
- Provide hackers access to valuable company information or personally identifiable information