One of the greatest ways to showcase our photography and share our passion is through our blogs. Also on the marketing side of things a blog can be one of the best ways for you to connect with potential customers. I remember some of my favorite wedding clients ever that had read so much of my blog before we met that by the time of the first consultation they already felt like they knew me and were ready to book me right away. With a good mix of personal posts, samples of my wedding work and some other art projects it always gave people a good view of my vision and style as well as who I am as a person. With wedding photography people are hiring you not just for your photography skills but also your total style and connecting with you on a personal level is important. So enough on why I think having a photography blog is so important, one of the hardest things about a blog is keeping it up and running. When I started my blog I never thought much about keeping it safe but many blogs no matter what platform they are built on can be easily hacked or have malware installed on them.
Since I have had my blog hacked a few times there are a lot of things I learned. You can read a few things to keep your wordpress site safe here: http://digitalphotobuzz.com/i-was-hacked. One of the dollars I have spent on my blog was a monitoring and malware cleanup service I found a few years ago called Sucuri security. It’s a yearly service and not cheap ($89 for 1 site) but worth every penny in my mind. They do a few things which are all pretty awesome.
First they help to protect your site with a wordpress plugin by having a “one click hardening”. There are some settings that this plugin turns on with your wordpress instance that help to secure it and the plugin does all the work. All you have to do is 1 click like the name says and it will help to secure your blog.
The next part that they do is constantly monitor your site for any potential issues. If someone might be trying to hack into the site you get an email so it keeps you always on top of the site. I know sometimes when things get busy you might not have the time to constantly check your blog so having it always monitored is a huge help.
The last part of their service which I have found invaluable a few times is malware cleanup. Many times you might not even know you have malware on your site. I had a piece of code on my site awhile back that I wasn’t aware of that would redirect only certain users to some spam site. It never came up when I went to the site but thankfully someone told me and it’s what lead me to Sucuri Security in the first place. If your site does become infected they will clean it up for you and are very quick whenever you have an issue.
If you want to keep your blog safe and it’s important to you I highly suggest checking our Sucuri Security. Click on the link below for more info.
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