Security is one of the top priorities for Google. Way back in 2014, they made it clear.
They announced that website security is something they expected from other businesses too.
Hence, they made it mandatory for websites to have HTTPS security.
They stated that HTTPS would subsequently be used as a ranking signal.
If your WordPress website isn’t secure, it becomes an easy target for cybercriminals. They can quickly introduce malware and other malicious codes into your WordPress website.
And Google doesn’t want to direct users to such malicious websites and decrease their brand’s reputation.
After all, Google is the ruler of the search engine domain. Thus, Google blocks more than ten thousand per day for malware and hides it from appearing in the Search Engine Results Page.
Thus, if you are serious about ranking your WordPress website on top of Google search pages, website security is something you should really focus on.
WordPress Website Security And SEO Rankings
Website Flagging and User Warning
There are many ways in which WordPress website vulnerabilities can be exploited that can lead to SEO rank dropping. Firstly, if your WordPress website is not secure, Google will flag it.
Remember these security warnings? Google will warn users accessing your website, stating that it is not secure. In almost all cases, users will exit your website and visit another secure website.
Thus, the bounce-off rate for your website will be high, and this will automatically lower your rankings on Google search engine results.
Moreover, if the user is trying to access your website directly but is using a proxy server, they, too, won’t be able to access your website.
Any connection request sent using a proxy is first intercepted by the proxy server, such as data center proxies.
The proxy server first accesses the data on the page, analyzes it, and displays the page to the user only if the page is deemed secure. If not, the access to the website is blocked.
You can also alternatively use a free proxies server list from proxyscrape.
To sum it up, if your website isn’t secure, it will have low to zero visitors, which will automatically lower your visibility on the internet.
Crawling Errors
Remember the ‘Error 404 – Content Not Found’ messages you are greeted to once in a while? It is because the content at the specified URL doesn’t exist anymore.
If your website is not secure, cybercriminals will hack it. They can delete the content on your web pages. This leads to the 404 Error.
Google won’t penalize you if this is a rare occurrence. But, if it keeps happening regularly, the Google crawler won’t appreciate it.
Again, Google doesn’t want to direct users to pages containing irrelevant information or no information at all.
Eventually, over time, your website will be looked at as untrustworthy, and its ranking will keep getting lower and lower.
Website Downtime
If your website is hacked, it can also result in downtime. This means that your website won’t load.
Any user trying to access your web pages at that particular moment won’t be able to do so. Thus, they will bounce off your website, which will impact your SEO rankings.
However, Google will give you the chance to recover. For example, it will try to index your site multiple times after it is down.
This can help improve your credibility and WordPress website SEO. But, if the downtime issue persists for long or multiple instances occur, chances are your SEO rankings will dwindle.
No matter how much you try to optimize your WordPress blog posts, other website pages, or implement other SEO strategies, it won’t help.
All your efforts will go down the drain if the content isn’t accessible to the user when needed.
Data Theft
Data breaching instances are increasing by the day. Losing valuable customer data is the worst thing that can happen to your website.
You put in the effort, time, money, and resources to improve your SEO to attract users.
But, once the users get to know that their confidential information is compromised, you end up losing their trust.
And it will take a long time to regain it. You might even end up losing customers for a lifetime.
For instance, users might automatically block your website on their own after a data breach. And we know how easy it is to block a website on Android, iPhone, desktop, or laptop these days.
Once your website is blocked, you lose out on a potential casual visitor or even a business client forever. People never check their blocklists and unblock websites proactively.
As the number of visitors to your website drops, Google will automatically drop your website SEO rankings.
Cloaking
Cloaking is a method wherein cybercriminals replace or add content irrelevant or malicious content to your WordPress website.
This results in users seeing different content on the search engine results page and on the actual webpage.
It happens because the Google crawler indexes one version of the page while a modified version is available to the user. The one that the attacker wants the user to see.
Cloaking can result in two consequences:
- First, Google has strict Webmaster guidelines and policies against cloaking. They will lower your SEO rankings if they find out that your website has been cloaked with malicious content.
- Secondly, your websites will experience a high bounce-off rate as users won’t be able to find the information they will be looking for. This, again, will mean low website visitors and lower your Google SEO rankings.
Improving WordPress Website Security
Website security is at the core of WordPress web development software. The software is audited on a regular basis by developers to ensure it is safe to use.
But, there’s more that can be done to keep your WordPress website secure.
And WordPress Website security is easy to improve, even if you are not tech-savvy. You can take a number of easily actionable steps to protect your WordPress website.
Some common methods to improve WordPress website security include:
- Installing a WordPress website backup solution
- Enabling web application firewall
- Implementing HTTPS/SSL website security
- Changing default settings
- Disabling file editing
- Disabling PHP file execution in directories
- Limiting login attempts
- Adding two-factor authentication
- Password-protecting admin and login page
- Adding security questions to WordPress login
- Scanning for malware and signs of security breaches
Thus, improving your WordPress website is fairly straightforward and simple. You just need to be proactive regarding WordPress website security.
Conclusion
We all know the importance of SEO rankings in today’s day and age. Ignoring your WordPress website security will lower your SEO rankings.
This will affect your online visibility, reduce the number of website visitors, and eventually impact your business growth. Thus, WordPress website security cannot be ignored at any cost.
