Get website ready now for 2016 – before you head out of the office for the holidays!

Here are our top 10 tech tips to get done this December:

  1. Check your domain name(s) renewal dates and set a calendar reminder in advance of the expiration date to ensure you retain those critical URLs.
  2. Review your website hosting package and backup strategy. Have your business needs changed? Do you need to update your plan? How frequently is a full backup of your web site being completed?
  3. Run a website statistics report and examine the results to evaluate where improvements can be made. Do your users only visit certain web pages and not others? Are any of your web pages displaying errors?
  4. Perform and review SEO reports. Are your organic or paid efforts giving you the results you desire?

Every business should take extra steps to safeguard its customers’ information and protect business technologies from hackers. It is always a good practice to change passwords at least 3 times a year. Make your password hard to crack. Good passwords should include both uppercase and lower case characters, special characters (like #$%! etc.) and be at least 21 characters long. You can find a few good online password generators (https://lastpass.com/generatepassword.php). If you use a password generator, make sure the passwords are generated on your local device such as your laptop or desktop instead of your handheld, and to be extra safe, change a few of the characters in the auto generated password before you use the new pas sword. A strong password would look like this: “g8T06^P4h&Jw@5X*8Aa79We.” Using a phrase with numbers replacing some key text characters is also a great idea.

A strong password is important to protect personal information and business assets online. Using a different password for each unique web site login that is long and has multiple types of characters (numbers, letter and symbols) will help protect you and your business from someone hacking into your accounts.