Guides — written by working testers

Website security, explained in plain English.

No jargon, no scare tactics. These are the security questions small-business owners actually type into Google, answered by the people who test websites by hand for a living.

What do these guides cover? The questions we get asked most: what a penetration test really costs, whether an automated scanner can replace a human tester, what to do when a customer demands a pentest report, and how attackers actually pick small websites. Every guide is written by the same engineers who perform Bug Circuit’s manual audits — a free critical-bug check and a $49 one-time full audit with a written report — so the advice reflects what we see on real small-business sites, not vendor marketing.

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How we write these guides

Three rules. First, practical over dramatic — we don’t do fear-mongering, because most small-site risk is boring and fixable, and scaring you into a purchase is how the industry got its reputation. Second, priced for small business — when a guide mentions costs, we use real market numbers, including the awkward ones, and we’re upfront that our own $49 audit is a productized small-site scope, not an enterprise engagement. Third, written from casework — everything here comes from what we actually find when we audit websites by hand, not from recycled vendor content. If a guide says scanners miss access-control flaws, it’s because we keep finding access-control flaws that scanners missed.

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