How to Check Whether a Website is Safe or Not

All websites are not safe. And surfing suspicious websites can harm you PC. So It’s better to check whether a website is safe or not before browsing into it.

There are many ways you can scan a website’s safety. There are a few ‘known’ tools out there which can do the task for you. Heard of McAfee? Certainly yes. They have a siteadvisor tool which tells whether the site is safe for browsing or not. Meanwhile we do have another good tool, WOT (Web of Trust). Which does the same task.

To get the best out of your web experience, install WOT or McAfee siteadvisor plugin/extension in your browser. It will tell you whether a site is safe or not whenever you open a website or search google for anything. Personally saying, I use WOT for chrome as I use Google Chrome a lot.

WOT: Site | Plugins: Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera and also available as bookmarklet

Siteadvisor: Site | Plugins: IE, Firefox and chrome

Common in both: Both do the same work so it’s up to you to select any of them. Sites which are safe are notified by green circles(WOT) / green checks (siteadvisor) and the ‘proven unsafe’ sites by red circles/checks. So it’s obviously not good to open the sites marked as Red. See the screenshot of  how WOT works in Google search (chrome)

WOT Features:

• WOT is a community, you can rate the websites too.
• Safeguards the search results.
• Integrated deeply in the browser. Circles the links inside Facebook, gmail and any other website.
• Fast and free.

SiteAdvisor Features:

• All of the above
• Protected Mode

How to use?

Quite simple it is, This is a noob’s guide. After installing any of them; Whenever you search for anything in Google (or any other search engine) keep an eye near the link. If it’s green, Proceed. If it’s Red, leave. Or if you just want to know about a website’s safety open their respective sites and search.

Conclusion: Though WOT works for me so I would recommend it to everyone. Both of them work inside social networking sites, search engines. Although some antivirus programs also offer the same features.

Tags: How To

Category: Internet