Hacking has become an eventuality for which all companies must prepare. Just like you have a smoke detector and a planned fire evacuation route, you should learn how to react to a hack. That means, first, learning the potential effects a hacked website would have on your business. Large corporations aren’t the only ones at risk. The Guardian reported, in early 2016, that “small businesses [are] now firmly in the crosshairs of cyber criminals, they are fast becoming their favoured target – and are often woefully unprepared.”

So what are the effects of a hacked website? They’re a lot more than a headache. You stand to lose a lot if and when hackers invade your site.

Lost Search Engine Ranking

You’ve worked hard to appear on the first page of search results. Now, you lose your spot entirely. Your organic ranking plummets. Where your site does appear in search, the result contains a warning, advising users not to click it. So, even if someone finds you, they will likely be scared away.

Google, along with other search engines, notices a hack. It then quarantines your site, effectively blacklisting it. Search Engine Watch says, “This happens to around 10,000 websites daily. If your site’s been blacklisted, you can expect to lose about 95% of your traffic.” You should act quickly, but the damage may be done. It can take days or weeks for a search engine to remove your site from quarantine once you’ve repaired it.

Wordfence conducted a survey of business whose websites had been hacked. Slightly less than half of the respondents said they were flagged by Google. While avoiding quarantine may have kept them off the blacklist, it may have also delayed their knowledge of the hack. “With over half of the sites not being flagged by Google, we can’t rely on Google to alert us to a hack,” they said.

Lost Traffic

Lost search engine ranking means lost traffic. People won’t find you, or they’ll heed warnings not to visit you. What is more, word travels fast about a hacked website, which could cause other potential customers to avoid you. Wordfence reported that 45%  of survey respondents saw search traffic drop following a hack. 9% of respondents said their traffic dropped more than 75%. Their most concerning discovery was that 5% of respondents said that their traffic never returned to normal!

Lost Public Trust

Hackers often target personal information of clients or customers. While you certainly want to protect your customers’ security by warning them, you risk losing their trust. Your crisis communications team — which, if you’re a small business, might be you — must carefully weigh the message. You need to quickly learn who and what was targeted and who needs to know. You want to be honest but not alarm anyone unnecessarily.

Remember, word may get out faster than you can react. Big hacks make news, and many people might learn about your hack in a matter of hours… even minutes.

Lost Money

Losing traffic means losing business, which means losing money. So, your costs over time could be astronomical.

But there are also immediate monetary costs. First, you have to fix your site. Wordfence says that getting hacked will cost you, on average, $2,518.

Some hackers demand ransoms to leave your site alone. One small business in the UK reported paying £3,000 pounds (around $4,500 at the time) to make hackers decrypt their files.

Take steps now to learn as much as possible about hacking. Prepare yourself and make a plan for how you will respond. As technology advances, stronger protections become available. However, the hackers benefit from new advances, too. So do what you can to keep one step ahead. Click here to learn more about what hackers want, and here to learn how to minimize risk with your e-commerce site.

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