3 months after you launch your website...

...you should check your results. Even if you used a professional to set up your website most likely you'll need to make some adjustments to improve your Google ranking.

If you built your website yourself using Squarespace or Wix you should hire a professional to optimize your website. Self-built sites typically don't work as well as professionally built sites, you probably realize your website is not accomplishing your goals.

Do not pay for online ads before you utilize a professional to optimize your site! Google and Facebook will happily take your money, but they won't tell you that your website should be optimized first.

18 years experience has taught us how to get results.

You can easily solve this problem before it happens to your website!

Recently I received an email from Google you should know about. It will effect your website.

The subject of the email was:
Nonsecure Collection of Passwords will trigger warnings in Chrome 56

Along with a lot of technical info the email also included this warning:
"The new warning is the first stage of a long-term plan to mark all pages served over the non-encrypted HTTP protocol as 'Not Secure'."

> So how does this effect you?

What Google is saying is that eventually they will mark all websites that are not using SSL. This will discourage viewers from coming to your website and may effect your Google ranking. Currently when someone searches Google for your website they see a list. In the future, next to your website will be a note that says something like "This website is not secure".

That will probably look similar to this:

Now for the Good News

If your website is hosted with Pritchard Hosting we have already solved this problem for you! Pritchard Hosting offers free SSL and it is already implemented for your website!

Contact us today for more information about how to use this on your website.

... but you still need to do yours.

Spend a little time, or a little money protecting your website investment.

Recently we were doing server upgrades for websites on Pritchard Hosting and found many websites that don't have the latest security patch.

If you are not on our monthly Preserve & Protect plan, you should be.
But if you prefer to do all the updates yourself let me tell you what a really good hacker can do.

A smart and effective hacker can hack an insecure website and create an admin account (which has already happened to some of your websites). Then the hacker can create a back door into your website and do no damage to your site. Then the hacker will sell access to your website to a email spammer or a link farmer. They would embed hidden links on your website and/or use your email address to send out spam emails. They could get away with it for years.

By the time you figured out your website was hacked you would have no clean backups because it would go on for a long time. Unfortunately for you, that would mean you would have to build an entirely new website.

So please, please, please login and update your websites. You'll be glad you did : )