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Is my website secure? The five minute check

هل موقعي آمن؟ الفحص في خمس دقائق

Worth looking at

Five things anyone can check without technical knowledge, and what a fail on each one means.

What to do

  1. Look for the padlock. Open your site and check the address bar. No padlock, or a warning, means visitors are being told your site is not safe, and Google marks it down.
  2. Check for updates. If it is WordPress or similar, log in and look for the updates count. A site months behind on updates is the way most small sites get hacked.
  3. Try the login page with the username admin. If it exists, rename it. Automated attacks try admin first, thousands of times a day.
  4. Ask when the last backup was and where it is. If the answer is not sure, you do not have one. A hacked site with a backup is an afternoon; without one it can be a rebuild.
  5. Search Google for your domain name and look at the results. Pages you did not create, or listings in another language, mean it has already been compromised.

These are the usual causes and the safe order to check them, not a diagnosis of your machine. If a step does not match what you are seeing, stop and ask.