How to tell if a website is safe before you click

Fake shops, cloned banks and lookalike login pages get more convincing every year, and a moment’s inattention is all it takes to hand over a password or card number. The good news: a handful of quick checks catch the large majority of dodgy sites. Here’s what to look at before you trust one.

The ten-second checks

Run through these before entering anything sensitive:

1. Read the address bar carefully. Scammers use lookalike domains — an extra word, a swapped letter, a wrong ending. The padlock only means the connection is encrypted, not that the site is honest.
2. Be wary if you arrived via a link in an email or text. Type the address yourself or use your own bookmark instead — this defeats most phishing.
3. Look for polish. Broken English, off-brand logos and wonky layout are red flags on a site claiming to be a big company.
4. Check for real contact details and, for shops, reviews off-site. A store with no address, no returns policy and no footprint is a warning.
5. Distrust prices that are too good to be true — the classic bait of a fake shop.

Extra care on public networks

On public Wi-Fi, there’s an added risk that the network itself redirects you somewhere fake. A VPN encrypts your connection so a hostile network can’t tamper with the sites you reach — one more reason to keep it on when you’re out, as we cover in staying safe on public Wi-Fi.

If you’re still unsure

When a site feels off, trust that instinct — don’t enter payment or login details. Search the company name plus “scam” or “reviews”, and go to the service directly through its official app or a known address instead. Ten seconds of checking beats weeks of cleaning up a stolen password.