7 bad pieces of advice for site owners

There are a great many articles on the internet with useful advice for site owners: how to promote a site, how to work with customers and win their trust, which design techniques ensure good traffic, and dozens more recommendations that genuinely work. 

We have written about that more than once ourselves, but bad advice is often remembered better, and a sense of contrariness makes people do the opposite — which in this case means doing the right thing. 

So today we will give 7 BAD pieces of advice for site owners, and very much hope you will not follow them.

1. If you have a site of your own, or several, be sure to use free hosting for them — that way the host will never owe you anything. And if your site loads slowly at peak times, you can drink a couple of cups of coffee meanwhile… or even bring the coffee to a grateful customer while your page opens for them.
2. Never use SSL certificates. Of course they guarantee a secure connection and ensure that data is not viewed or intercepted by attackers during transmission, but they cost money and that is exactly where you must save. And pay no attention to the fact that the number of customers is not growing. It has nothing to do with people trusting sites with a green padlock more. Most likely it is the fault of ill-wishers or atmospheric fluctuations.
3. Never update your CMS and its plugins, and do not check the site for malicious code. If an attack does happen, why should that be your problem? Surely somebody is supposed to be watching out for that.
4. Do not change your passwords! Even if you are broken into constantly, the saying "consistency is the mark of mastery" did not appear out of nowhere.
5. Do not make backups. Luck is bound to follow your business, so neither a power surge in the data centre nor a hardware failure will of course have any effect on the safety of your data.
6. Put as many sites as you can on one hosting account. That will not only reduce the loading speed of each of them effectively, but if one of the sites is broken into it will also let the attacker play with all of them at once.
7. Always put as many files as you can in one directory on the server. The idea that a server starts slowing down when there are more than a thousand files in one directory is nothing but a scary bedtime story for little sysadmins.

Read our advice carefully and never follow it. Then everything in your business will be splendid.