What happens if my website isn't secure?
An unsecured website can be compromised by malicious bots or attackers, allowing unwanted content, redirects or malware to appear. This can damage customer trust while also causing search engines and advertising platforms to treat the website as unsafe, compromised or unreliable.
Your website has two important audiences to protect
Most businesses think of website security as protecting files, passwords and customer data. But a SME website is constantly being accessed by two very different audiences:
1. Human visitors – your customers, prospects, employees and business partners.
2. Trusted machine visitors – legitimate crawlers and automated systems used by search engines, advertising platforms and increasingly AI services to understand, evaluate and discover your website.
Not every robot visiting a website is harmful. Search crawlers are necessary for discovery, while malicious bots may attempt credential attacks, scraping, spam, abuse or other unwanted activities. Cloudflare estimates that more than 40% of internet traffic is bot traffic, with a significant portion attributed to malicious bots.
For an SME, website security therefore has another important job:
Keep harmful machines out while allowing genuine people and trusted machines to access the right version of your website.
1. Customers can see a brand you never intended to show
A compromised website does not necessarily disappear or stop working.
That can make the problem more dangerous.
The homepage may still look normal to the business owner while attackers insert additional pages, links, scripts, advertisements or redirects elsewhere on the website.
A customer could therefore arrive expecting your company but encounter:
- unfamiliar advertisements or content
- spam pages
- unwanted redirects
- altered links
- suspicious downloads
- misleading information
- pages that no longer represent your company
The result is not simply an IT problem. It becomes a brand problem.
A visitor does not necessarily know that malware created the inappropriate content. They only know that they saw it on your domain.
This is particularly relevant to the type of unwanted content SMEs sometimes discover after an infection. Sucuri’s analysis of 70.8 million website scans during 2024 identified 1,176,701 infected websites, including 822,651 detections involving active malware or malicious redirects. It also identified 422,741 websites affected by SEO spam.
So the visible website your company designed may no longer be the only content being served from your domain.
2. Google may see something different from your customers
This creates a second problem that is less obvious.
What your business owner sees and what a search crawler sees are not always the same thing.
Attackers can inject content specifically intended to influence search engines. Google itself describes hacked-content techniques where attackers add hidden links or text, inject pages, use redirects, or use cloaking to present different content depending on the visitor or crawler.
This means an SME owner can visit the homepage and think:
“Everything looks fine.”
But Google may discover completely different URLs or content associated with that domain.
For example, Google has specifically documented hacked sites containing unexpected search terms and recommends checking for suspicious subjects such as pharmaceutical, casino and other spam content because these can indicate that unauthorized pages have been inserted into a website.
That changes website security from merely:
“Is my homepage working?”
to the more important question:
“What is my website showing to every type of visitor?”
3. Your google search visibility can be affected
Search engines depend on crawlers to understand what a website contains.
If attackers inject spam pages, hidden links, redirects or misleading content, those crawlers may begin associating your domain with material that has nothing to do with your actual business.
Google states that it attempts to keep hacked content out of its search results. Its Search Console Security Issues report specifically identifies hacked content, malware and unwanted software that can affect websites.
Google’s spam policies also explain that policy-violating pages or sites can rank lower or be omitted from Google Search, including situations involving hacker-injected content and redirects.
For an SME that has spent years building organic search visibility, the security issue can therefore extend beyond cleaning malware.
You may also need to repair:
Website → Search Engine Understanding → Search Visibility
4. Your google ads can stop sending customers to the website
The same problem can affect paid advertising.
If your SME depends on Google Ads for enquiries, an infected website can interrupt the entire customer acquisition path:
Google Ad → Website → Enquiry → Sale
Google Ads explicitly does not allow hacked or hijacked destinations. Google defines a compromised site as one whose code has been manipulated by a third party without the site owner’s knowledge, often in a way that harms users.
Google also advises advertisers affected by a compromised-site issue to identify and remove malicious code and use Search Console’s Security Issues report to investigate the website.
So even when:
- your advertising budget is available
- your campaign is correctly configured
- your keywords are performing
- customers are searching for your service
The website itself can become the weak point that prevents the advertising journey from working properly.
For SMEs dependent on paid leads, website security is therefore also marketing infrastructure protection.
5. Bad bots can pollute the traffic data used to make business decisions
There is another less visible consequence.
Not all website traffic represents potential customers.
Malicious or unwanted bot activity can produce artificial:
- page views
- sessions
- geographic traffic
- form submissions
- bounce rates
- conversion activity
Cloudflare notes that bot traffic can distort metrics such as page views, bounce rates, session duration, locations and conversions, making website performance harder to measure accurately.
For an SME trying to understand whether its marketing works, polluted traffic creates a business problem:
Bad traffic can lead to bad interpretation, which can lead to bad marketing decisions.
This is why Skytomato views secure website design not simply as blocking hackers but as helping create a cleaner digital environment for genuine human traffic and legitimate crawlers.
6. Search and AI crawlers are becoming a bigger part of the website audience
The machine audience is becoming increasingly important.
Cloudflare reported that traffic from AI and search crawlers increased 18% between May 2024 and May 2025 among the cohort it analysed. Googlebot crawling increased 96% during the same comparison period.
That means modern websites increasingly need to distinguish between two fundamentally different types of automated traffic:
Good bots
Search, indexing and legitimate discovery crawlers that businesses generally want to reach their content.
Bad bots
Automated traffic attempting abuse, spam, credential attacks, scraping or other malicious activity.
A secure SME website should therefore not simply “block robots.”
It should help:
- Block the bad machines. Welcome the trusted machines. Serve genuine people correctly.
Security Protects More Than the Website
For an SME, a compromised website can create a chain reaction:
Malicious Traffic → Website Compromise → Wrong Content → Customer Distrust → Search Problems → Advertising Disruption → Lost Business Opportunities
This is why Skytomato approaches secure website design as protection for the wider digital business ecosystem — not merely protection for website files.
How to Keep Your Website Safe from Attacks
Now that you have become acquainted with the most common security threats your websites are prone to face, let’s prevent it from happening. Apart from having a brilliant web design, your website needs to be hack-proof.1. Use HTTPS Protocol
If your website doesn’t currently run on an HTTPS protocol, it is high time you got one. This gives your site visitors an assurance that they are transacting or interacting with the right server and nothing else can alter the content they come across. Without this protocol, a hacker is granted the freedom to alter information on your web page in a bid to steal information from your website visitors. It is clear to an intending website visitor that the website is safe if there is a https:// starting the URL as compared to http:// which implies the website is not secure.
2. Choose a Safe Web Hosting Plan
Putting things in perspective, you share the same levels of protection as the servers of your web hosting provider. Using a shared hosting plan is a commonly explored option these days because of its appealing price. Always go for a web host that provides website hosting Malaysia with good security. Feel free to check out some of the plans here: https://www.skytomato.my/business-web-hosting/
3. Secure your Personal Computer
It is common practice for hackers these days to target an individual’s website by injecting malware into the individual’s target. These malwares are charged with the responsibility of injecting malicious files into websites by stealing FTP logins. In order to fight against this, ensure your personal computer and devices are monitored by an antivirus software which doesn’t just trap viruses but can smoke out malwares and control them. Antiviruses are not as antique as most people think and can save you a lot of stress.
4. Limit User Access
If you have employees or are hiring a consultant, blog writer, ensure you do not give them the same access as you have to the website backend. This is because even if you take all precautionary measures and these individuals aren’t careful, your website becomes compromised anyway.
5. Update your Passwords
If these tips were ranked in order of importance, this should top the list. Do not repeat passwords you share with other websites. Regularly update your password to make it even harder for hackers to get access to your website. You could use free password managers to generate long passwords that are almost impossible to crack. Using a web host that makes use of a two-factor authentication would also help a great deal.
