Website security refers to all the strategies and tools you use to protect your website from cyber-attacks. To prevent security breaches, a web developer will install firewalls or security software to help monitor, prevent, and minimize the damage done by such attacks.
Despite using those tools, hackers can still find a weak spot in your site and compromise its content or visitors. They can attack your site with SQL Injection and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) or cause security misconfiguration and break authentication.
If you want to enhance your website security and prevent those things from happening on your site, this article will do good for you. Throughout this post, we’ll show you five ways to improve your site’s protection.
5 Ways to Secure Your Website
As your website contains valuable data, protecting it should be your number one priority. Here are the five easy ways to strengthen your website’s security.
1. Use a Secure Web Hosting Service
Hosting your site on a web hosting server means trusting your site’s data with the company. Therefore, before launching your website, make sure to choose a reliable web hosting provider.
Good web hosting should accommodate your site with HTTPS protocol integration, firewalls, antivirus and malware scanning, and backups.
If you’re having trouble finding the right hosting, check out Hostinger for a great overall offer. This hosting provider also utilizes Cloudflare to protect its name servers from DDoS attacks.
2. Install an SSL Certificate
Suppose you’re running an eCommerce website or one that requires your visitors to fill in personal information. In that case, you need to get an SSL certificate for it.
An SSL, or Secure Socket Layer, gets a website to transition from HTTP to HTTPS. Its job is to encrypt all information for the intended parties: the web server and the client.
Without an SSL certificate, your website will be vulnerable to leaked information, leading to damaged brand reputation and revenue drops.
Luckily, integrating an SSL certificate into your website is a piece of cake. On top of that, Google also confirms that SSL is a ranking factor.
3. Use Safe Passwords
Passwords are the easiest bit to improve if you want to enforce your site’s security. You just do your site a big favor by mixing capital letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols.
Here are some other tips on getting your site a strong password:
- Never reuse passwords.
- Never use your personal information, like your date of birth.
- Combine three or more unrelated words and mix them with special characters.
- Make it at least 10-characters long.
Managing passwords can be daunting, especially if you have dozens of accounts. To overcome this problem, use a safe password manager, such as LastPass. Such tools can also help you generate strong passwords for your website.
4. Install Security Plugins
While CMSs like WordPress and Drupal have integrated security into their systems, you can always install a security plugin to enhance your site’s protection.
A security plugin can help your website monitor your network, scan for malware, prevent brute force attacks, and blacklist malicious IP addresses.
If you use WordPress, the All in One WP Security & Firewall offers your site the must-have features. Beyond that, it’s free and easy-to-use.
5. Update Your Website Regularly
On top of getting new features, keeping up with WordPress updates means getting bug fixes, performance enhancements, and security improvements.
Along with the new update, the developers will also release a list of the things it fixed. Thus, it’s easier for hackers and malicious code distributors to attack the sites using the older version.
Moreover, as WordPress powers 38.8% of all websites worldwide, hackers often make the websites utilizing the CMS easy targets. Therefore, whenever an update notification pops up, punch the install button immediately.
Why Website Security is Important
If you think you have little chances of having your site hijacked, don’t. Hacking can happen to businesses of all sizes, even to personal blogs and social media accounts.
As of April 2020, 24.1% of our internet traffic comes from bad bots. The operators often target personal information in exchange for money. Or, they can come from one of your competitors that tries to bring your business down.
Moreover, there are increasing numbers of cybersecurity issues ever since the Covid-19 outbreak. And it’s reported that 28% of website security breaches happen to small businesses.
Here are some more reasons to secure your website properly:
- It protects your customers’ data. Without adequate website security, you risk your client’s information, such as credit card numbers and identities. When that happens, you can lose their trust, impacting a lousy company reputation.
- It keeps your site up on the search result. Since 2018, Google has been blacklisting sites without SSL certificates. If your site gets the “Your connection is not secure” warning, it’ll lose traffic, leading to revenue fall.
- It protects your company’s assets. Your clients’ data is not the only thing hackers are after. Cybercriminals can also infect your hardware with viruses. Thus, ensure your website security is top-level to have your physical equipment remain safe.
- It is more cost-effective than website clean-up. Investing in good website security can save you from the immense cost of malware removal. Also, you cannot always rely on a website clean-up, as hacking often causes irreversible damage.
Conclusion
Hackers and malicious code distributors get more and more creative when spreading threats on the internet. As WordPress is the most popular CMS around, it becomes the most common target for cybercrimes. As a web owner, you need to ensure your site is well-protected.
You’ve learned the five easy steps to secure your website. Now, go check yours. Ensure it’s free from loopholes to keep hackers away.