You’ve created a web-based application for your business. At this point, you’re already ahead of the curve. The internet might be integral in our lives but around 50% of businesses don’t have a website. As shocking as that might sound, the reality is that many business owners still don’t appreciate the benefits or nuances of the online world.
Therefore, if you’ve created a web app, you’re already doing something right. However, that’s only one of many battles you’ll have to win if you want your website to boost your business.
Protect Your Website
Before you start welcoming users and, importantly, selling goods or services via your site, you need to secure it. According to research from Hiscox, small businesses in the UK are targeted by 65,000 attempted cyber attacks per day.
Put simply, there are risks when you’re operating online and you need to ensure you don’t put your customers at risk. As a standard, you should use a web application firewall to protect your app. Additionally, you should use recognized processors such as Visa to ensure payments meet regulatory PCI DSS standards.
Promote Your Website
Once your website is working and secure, the next thing you need is traffic. Although there is no one size fits all approach to generating traffic, social media has become one of the stand out methods over the last decade.
Facebook has 2.27 billion active monthly users, Twitter has 326 million and Instagram has 800 million. Between those three platforms, you’ve got access to 3+ billion active users every month. By finding a niche for your product and creating eye-catching posts, you can generate a significant amount of interest without spending much, if any, money.
Manage Your Website
Eventually, when people are flocking to your site, the issue of traffic management becomes important. Without the right provisions in place, your site can crash and that means costly downtime and server upgrades. A cost-effective way to manage traffic slow, aka load balancing, is to use a HAProxy (High Availability Proxy).
Open-source technology, HAProxy services are a free alternative to on-edge load balancing software. In simple terms, this technology will improve the speed and stability of your site by distributing workloads across multiple services. By spreading the work, you don’t put too much pressure on a single server. This, in turn, makes everything more reliable.
Build, Secure, Promote and Maintain
Building a website is a lot easier than it used to be. However, there are a lot of business owners that still aren’t doing it. Even those that are doing it aren’t always doing it the right way. Without using the right security provisions, advertising methods and site management tools, any website is doomed to fail.
Therefore, if you do get ahead of the curve and create a website for your business, make sure you have all the necessary systems in place to ensure that you don’t ruin your hard work with needless mistakes.
