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February 28, 2022 In Managed IT Services By admin

Maintain Your WordPress Website With These 6 Easy Steps

Maintaining your WordPress website is essential to ensuring that it runs smoothly and stays secure. Unfortunately, many business owners don’t know how to do this themselves. That’s why we’ve put together a list of the six most essential tasks that you should be performing on a regular basis. By following this checklist, you’ll help keep your site running quickly and avoid any potential security vulnerabilities or other issues.

Create complete backups of your website

One of the most important things you can do to protect your website is to back it up periodically. This will allow you to restore your site if something goes wrong, such as a hacker attack or server crash. There are several ways to create backups, including using plugins or manually copying your files and database. But while plugins like BackUpWordPress and hosting servers like SiteGround automate the backup process, performing manual backups may still be necessary to cover all your bases.

Verify your backups

Just because you have backups doesn’t mean they’re doing their job. You should test your backups regularly to make sure they are working properly. This can be done by restoring a backup to a test site or simply downloading the files and checking them to make sure they are complete. The last thing you need is for your backups to fail on the day you need them most.

Perform daily security scans

One of the best ways to stay ahead of potential security threats is to monitor your website closely for any signs of compromise. A good way to do this is to perform daily security scans, which will help you track any changes or suspicious activity. There are a number of different tools and services that can help you with this, and one of the most popular ones is Sucuri. Not only does this plugin carry out inspections, but it also sends an SMS to notify you of any suspicious activity and emails you a daily status report of your website’s security.

Scan for malware

Cyberthreats are growing in both number and sophistication. With every passing day, new strains of malware are developed and released onto business networks and systems. Unless you are a bonafide hacker yourself, detecting malware might be a little tricky. WordPress plugins like Wordfence keep your website safe using the latest firewall rules and flagging the latest malware signatures and malicious IP addresses.

Conduct page speed audits

Slow and steady may be qualities valued by some, but not when it comes to your website. Plugins like Google Pagespeed Insights test how fast your site loads. If it takes more than five seconds, you should consider implementing caching and other measures to speed up your site. Slow sites put off visitors, and that further lowers those sites’ search rankings.

Review your site’s structure and content

Just as you should periodically review your website’s security, you should also take a look at its overall structure and content. Are the pages well organized and easy to navigate? Is the content relevant and up to date? If not, you may want to consider making some changes.

Forbes, National Geographic, and The New York Times are all powered by WordPress, which means you are in good company. By sticking to the checklist, you too can harness the power of this online, open-source website creation tool. Or, instead of signing up for half a dozen services that need daily check-ins, why not have us take care of all of it for you? If you have further questions, don’t hesitate to reach out and give us a call!

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February 24, 2022 In Managed IT Services By admin

5 Ways Your Business Can Benefit From Dashboards

Data dashboards have become increasingly popular for businesses. These data visualization tools give you an overview of how your business is performing, and they cater to a wide variety of users, from marketing staff to project managers. Let’s take a look at how dashboards can support your business activities.

Marketing insights

Your organization’s marketing department analyzes a significant amount of data from various channels. Whether their purpose is to forecast monthly sales, predict trends, or build marketing strategies, marketing specialists use dashboards to compare, sort, and analyze raw data to produce meaningful information presented in an easy-to-understand manner. This helps key decision makers in your organization to formulate better marketing campaigns.

Tracking sales opportunities

Sales dashboards are ideal for tracking your organization’s products and services. They help you identify sales opportunities by monitoring top-selling products and comparing the growth in revenue on a regular basis. Sales dashboards sync to your raw data, so your charts are always up to date. This eliminates the need to manually enter and prepare sales reports and charts.

Social media management

Social media management is more than just posting statuses on your business’s social media accounts. And in most cases, your social media platform’s default dashboard doesn’t give you deep insights into your social media campaigns. What’s more, managing multiple social media accounts can quickly become tedious since you have to use several login credentials. Instead, you can manage all of your accounts through a comprehensive social media dashboard, saving you valuable time and effort.

Financial reports

Presenting financial data is a complex process that often leads to misinterpretation of critical information. Dashboards simplify the creation of financial reports, and financial analysts can take advantage of dashboards to display sensitive data — be it customer invoices, progress toward revenue goals, or business expenses — in an understandable graphical format.

Project collaboration

All businesses require their employees to collaborate on projects, whether on site or online. Project supervisors need to get their teams together to give them project requirements, deadlines, and responsibilities, and to get progress updates. By using project collaboration dashboards, team members will see a project’s complete workflow, allowing for a more efficient and collaborative working environment.

Dashboards streamline the presentation of complex business data and make your team more efficient. If you’re looking to implement dashboards and other cutting-edge tools to make your job easier, contact the Net Activyt team today.

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February 21, 2022 In IT Security Services, Managed IT Services By admin

More Scammers Are Using Social Media To Target Victims

An increasing number of scammers are using social media to target victims and relying on social engineering tricks to convince people to part with their personal information or money.  The problem has grown serious enough that the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) has issued a formal warning to consumers.

According to a recently released FTC report:

“More than 95,000 people reported about $770 million in losses to fraud initiated on social media platforms in 2021. 

Those losses account for about 25 percent of all reported losses to fraud in 2021 and represent a stunning eighteen-fold increase over 2017 reported losses. Reports are up for every age group, but people 18 to 39 were more than twice as likely as older adults to report losing money to these scams in 2021.

More than half of people who reported losses to investment scams in 2021 said the scam started on social media. Reports to the FTC show scammers use social media platforms to promote bogus investment opportunities and even to connect with people directly as supposed friends to encourage them to invest. 

People send money, often cryptocurrency, on promises of huge returns, but end up empty-handed.”

Overall cryptocurrency scams are regarded as the number one threat for investors in 2022, according to a new report from the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA). However, the FTC is cautioning all users to exercise caution and develop better habits when scrolling through their favorite social media platform.

They recommend setting limits on who can see your posts, taking advantage of increasingly robust privacy controls, opting out of targeted advertising, and doing more due diligence on any company you plan on doing business with before buying anything from them.

It’s good advice in general but it is especially important now given how prevalent social media-based attacks are becoming.

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February 17, 2022 In Cloud Computing, Managed IT Services By admin

Building a Secure Environment for Collaboration

More workplaces than ever before are utilizing the power of remote technology, but this also creates problems with security that must be addressed. How can you ensure that your organization isn’t putting itself at risk as a result of this general displacement of your workforce? Let’s discuss some action items you might choose to implement for your business.

What Changes When People Work Remotely?

One big change your employees might not grasp is that working remotely effectively distributes your entire operational infrastructure across many networks, most of which your organization has no control over. This means that employees have to do a lot of legwork to keep your business secure, too. When more devices are added to the network, more opportunities arise for hackers to make their way to your infrastructure.

When onboarding new employees, be sure to include the expected protocols for working remotely. This includes who supplies the devices, where important data is hosted, how employees are accessing said data (including devices/networks), whether or not a VPN is involved, etc. All of it must be included, and if you don’t keep your employees apprised of the expectations—especially new ones—they will not comply.

The Threat of Personal Devices

Many employers might find themselves gawking at the concept of purchasing new endpoints for each remote employee. While one might argue that, from a security standpoint, it is an effective use of funds, it isn’t the most functional. Personal devices might save you money, but they are not going to be as secure, as you have no control over their operating systems, installed software, password practices, and so on.

Data breaches happen even to secured systems, so imagine the pain of dodging these bullets with even more open vulnerabilities. To this end, be sure that all company-owned data is saved to company-controlled infrastructures, like an on-site server or cloud platform. If you can limit the amount of company data on employee devices, you can better secure it.

Collaboration Challenges

Employees now depend on collaboration apps to get projects done and to keep communication lines open, but these tools are not necessarily designed to prioritize security. One way you can ensure that security is not put at risk is by isolating conversations to specific users or groups. This will keep you from overexposing certain data to unsecured parties. This can happen fairly easily, especially for larger or medium-sized organizations.

The need to train your employees cannot be overstated. You must invest resources into ensuring that your employees are receiving the training needed to prioritize security. While they don’t need to become security experts, even the basics can be enough to improve cybersecurity standards for your organization. Consider teaching them how to identify spam attacks, how to create complex passwords, etc.

If you need some help with preparing your business for remote communications that prioritize security, Net Activity can help. To learn more, reach out to us at 215-503-5150.

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