Any business worth its salt generally has a website that took months, if not years, of time, money, and research to put together.

Now imagine you create one, and in one night all that work goes down the drain with no way of getting it back…

To avoid this, you may want to consider obtaining or performing a technical audit on your website. Not only can it save your virtual investment in the case of viruses or other malicious entities, but it allows you to experiment through backup versions and reveals crucial areas of improvement. In other words, it works to keep your website as lucrative and effective as possible.

This article will go into detail about how to check for site security, backups, and updates through technical audits and why each respective component is so important.

Keep reading to find out ways to keep your website safe, secure, and up to date!

Technical Audit: Inspecting Site Security

Technical AuditArguably the most crucial and delicate part of technical auditing is the analysis and assessment of your web system and its security standards. In other words, a security audit.

This looks at different aspects of your website and its management, such as:

  • Web system core
  • Extensions
  • Themes
  • General infrastructure
  • Vulnerabilities and loopholes in security systems

This type of technical audit is generally followed by what’s called a penetration test or pentest. These take the weaknesses found in your system and exploit them to emulate real-life cyberattack scenarios. By doing these steps you, or whoever is performing your technical audit, can find the risks that are attached to each vulnerability and address them.

How To Test for Site Security

The most common tool used when it comes to testing site security is vulnerability scanners. However, automated security audits, manual security audits, and professional security audits are also used. These procedures use different programs to gather the necessary information about your site’s security.

Tools or programs you can implement to perform a security audit include:

  • Nikto
  • Nmap
  • SQLmap

You can further use these different programs to find the severity of any vulnerabilities within your web system. For instance, Burp Suite has an Intruder tool that allows you to stage a digital attack on your site to test your security’s weaknesses.

Hacks can be costly, so it’s important to keep your digital defenses strong. Without a strong security system, your website can fall victim to data theft, ransomware, the misuse of data, defamation, and more.

Technical Audit: Creating Backups

Site security isn’t perfect. Even with the best and most well-built digital defense system, malicious entities can still slip through the cracks. Consequently, it’s crucial and one of, if not the most important step toward protecting your site, to perform thorough and regular backups. This can be done manually or set up automatically.

How To Create Backups

Backing up your website involves creating a copy of all the data on it, from files to content and media. This is usually done via FTP (File Transfer Protocol) or SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol). The former is the traditional file transfer protocol, and the latter is the same but with an additional layer of security. Both store all your data on the cloud so it’s consistently accessible.

It’s recommended to schedule regular website backups. Doing so allows the most updated version of your site to always be available for restoration purposes. This can be done on a weekly or daily basis, depending on the type of website you own. For instance, if your site has a blog and you’re routinely uploading new articles, you’ll want to upload backups more often.

Reasons to Backup Your Site

Protect Against Online Threats

Just like site security, one of the main reasons backing up your website is so important is to protect it against hackers and other malicious entities. According to TechJury, 64% of companies across the globe fall victim to at least one type of cyberattack. This includes phishing, malware attacks, and more.

By being able to restore a clean version of your site almost immediately you can deal with digital attacks more strategically and waste no time getting your website back online. As a bonus, you can even run a malware detection tool during your backup restoration. This helps to catch any possible vulnerabilities early.

Make Web Host Migration Easier

If at some point in time you wish to switch web hosts having a backup version makes the process quick and easy. Jumping web hosts involves moving all the files on your website to a new server. This can be a lengthy and complicated process if done from scratch.

However, with an up-to-date website backup at the ready, the process becomes very straightforward. Meaning you can transfer your exact website with virtually no hiccups or complications. In addition, if you’re reworking the design of the site’s integral components, such as blog posts or images, they won’t be lost in the process.

Ability To Create a Test Site

Having a safe-guarded backup of your website gives you the freedom to make major changes to a copy of your site’s design without yet being live or viewable to the public. In other words, the opportunity to create a test site.

Let your imagination go wild and experiment with different layouts, color schemes, and more. Once you’re happy with the alterations go ahead and publish your new site, or scratch it altogether if you change your mind!

Technical Audit: Performing Updates

Having an updated website is pivotal to maintaining an engaged audience with desirable content. In other words, to have an online presence that remains successful you need to keep it updated both in appearance and content. If not, your site may seem stale or irrelevant and therefore less reliable to potential clients or customers.

Signs or reasons to update your website include:

  • An outdated design
  • A decrease in online sales
  • Revamping keyword targeting and overall SEO strategy
  • High bounce rate and/or slow loading speeds

You want your website to represent your business. As companies change over time so should your site in order to continually represent your brand in a clean and modern way.

How To Update Your Site

Analyze Your Metrics

Your website’s metrics or analytics give you an idea as to how your audience is interacting with your site. This can be done by enabling tracking tools and other programs that monitor your site’s traffic. These digital mechanisms give you valuable information, such as which pages are most popular, how much time searchers spend on each page, bounce rates, and more.

By understanding your audience’s behavior, you can then begin to dissect why they may do what they do. For instance, if a landing page has a high bounce rate you may want to look at it in comparison to others and define what you’re doing wrong. This will help you to make informed decisions when it comes to making updates to your website.

Review Current Content and Design

One of if not the most important parts of updating your website is implementing a thorough front-end evaluation. This is any part of your site that is live or visible online.  Analyzing what works and what doesn’t throughout is crucial to maintaining an effective digital presence.

You want to avoid things like difficult navigation, obnoxiously bright or bold colors, and lengthy contact forms. These are but a few things to name that can end up viciously steering away customers, even if you have high-quality content.

Visuals

As time goes on you may want to inspect your site’s visual assets. This involves checking images or videos for both quality and relevance. If either of these is blurry, pixelated, or generally outdated to your current brand identity it can deter searchers from visiting or staying on your website. This effectively increases its bounce rate. You especially want to inspect your videos as old video files can negatively impact your site’s loading speed and current user experience.

Written

It’s important to keep up with the written work on your website. In other words, what was relevant then may not be relevant now. Having outdated content, such as missing, incorrect, or off-brand information, can hurt the credibility of your business and even your domain authority.

In addition, as your company grows your target market may change. It’s vital to adapt your digital presence accordingly to remain relevant and effective as an online entity.

Get A Technical Audit Today!

A technical audit is a multilayered and multifaceted process that’s crucial to the continuing effectiveness of your website. Every step of the process, whether it’s site security, backups, or updates, involves a variety of aspects, each just as vital as the other. Though you can do it manually it’s recommended to hire a professional. This ensures nothing is missed and every component is addressed with an expert hand. Such an investment can bring higher traffic, increased sales, and more to your website.

Guarantee the success of your digital presence today with a professional technical audit!

Why wait to amplify your business impact?

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