Welcome to Spot It, Stop It, your free website safety course. Over the next seven days you'll get one short lesson a day. Each one is a 5-minute read, a one-minute video and a one-page checklist, and each one ends with an easy win you can do straight away.
Let's start with the question almost every owner asks: "Why would anyone bother hacking my little website?"
The honest answer is that nobody does. Robots do.
Hacking today is mostly automated. Programs scan the whole internet around the clock, and they ask every website the same three questions:
- Is there an old door? Software or an add-on with a known hole.
- Is there a lock to pick? A login page and a weak, reused or stolen password.
- Is there a person to trick? An email, a fake invoice or a fake update.
If the answer to any of them is yes, they get in. They don't check who you are first. You aren't a target. You're a match.
The scale is hard to picture. One security firm, Wordfence, blocked 18.2 billion password-guessing attempts on the WordPress sites it protects in just three months. That's around 200 million a day.
Here's the good news. Robots are lazy. When a site doesn't match, they move on to the next one. That's what this course is about: learning the patterns they look for, so your site stops matching.
Today's easy win (about 5 minutes)
Add your website to Google Search Console. It's free, and Google will email you if it spots hacked pages or malware on your site. Think of it as a smoke alarm for your website. Your checklist shows you how.
Coming up in this course
- The front door: how passwords really get stolen
- The side doors: plugins, add-ons and old software
- The email trick: scams that look real
- Your laptop is part of your website
- The keys: your domain, your email and your backups
- How to tell if you've been hacked, and the door that isn't there