10 Essential Tips to Keep Your Website Secured

Hackers are invisible and fast. They hack your website for details of customers’ accounts, especially their credit card information. And as the website owner, you have a legal obligation to protect this data from theft and to report security breaches that occur. You can never undo the damage done by a hacker, but you can take precautions to prevent this from happening. The goal of this article is to give you some general best practices that can help you keep your website secure. If you have at least a basic knowledge of what is possible, you can protect your website against hackers.

Here are the basic things you could do to make your website secure:

1. Keep Your Website Up-To-Date

Outdated software is more susceptible to hacks and cyberattacks. Just like keeping your computer's operating system up-to-date to keep it secure, website plugins and add-ons also need to be updated from time to time to make them secure.

Failing to update your website’s software, security, and scripts when necessary is like allowing intruders and malware access to your site.

2. Find a Secure Hosting Option

Not all website hosts offer the same level of security. Shop around and don’t just settle for the cheapest one. Find a hosting company that is capable of protecting their own servers from possible attacks. Some hosting companies also provide added extras such as SSL and regular backups.

Ask your provider how they keep your websites protected. Be sure they make regular software updates to the server operating system and other installed software.

3. Use an SSL Certificate

If your website collects personal information from the user (like during the registration or checkout process), then you need to encrypt that connection. An insecure connection puts your customers at risk of data theft and computer viruses. Installing SSL on your website creates a secure handshake between your website and clients’ devices. This will prevent the information from being read in transit and accessed without consent. It also gives assurance to your visitors that you take their privacy and security seriously.

4. Use Strong Passwords

Hackers gain access to many websites because the passwords used are too weak. Create strong and unique passwords for your website (12 characters or more with letters and symbols on them).

And If you store user passwords on your website, make sure to store them in an encrypted format.

5. Choose Plugins and Add-Ons Carefully

When it comes to choosing plugins and add-ons for your website, it is a must to check their rating and number of downloads. Also, find out when the software was last updated by its creator. If a plugin or add-on has been left untouched by the creator for a long time, chances are it will bring risks to your website.

6. Use Security Software or Plugins

The moment your website goes online, it is exposed to a rogue’s gallery of cyber threats. Automated bots are out there scanning for unsecured websites, and newly created sites are an easy target. Having a web application firewall (WAF) will secure your website before the attacks start.

Website application firewalls (WAFs) (usually cloud-based) are set up between your website server and the data connection and read every bit of data passing through them.

7. Hide Any Admin Pages

You do not want your admin pages to be indexed by search engines. To avoid this, you should use the robots.txt file. Robots.txt is used by websites to communicate with web crawlers and other web robots about which areas of the website should not be processed or scanned. If they are not indexed, then they are harder for hackers to find.

8. Limit File Uploads

Your website may need to allow users or website visitors to upload files or images to your web server. This is a major concern because hackers could upload malicious content to your website. Images, for example, may contain malware. No matter how thoroughly the system checks for bugs, they can still get through and give a hacker access to your site’s data. To avoid such a scenario, prevent direct access to any uploaded files. Store them outside the root directory and use a script to access them when necessary. Your web host will probably help you set this up.

9. Remove Form Auto-Fill

Though the Auto-fill feature is very useful, it could also be a way of committing data theft. Having auto-fill enabled for forms on your website makes the user vulnerable to data theft when their computer or phone is stolen. You should never expose your website to attacks that exploit the laziness of a legitimate user.

10. Allow Lots of Time for Testing

When creating a website, lots of time and thought are spent on the design and user experience. These are important aspects of your website, but you should also pay attention to its security. A good developer will invest more time in the testing phase to address all possible security issues.

Always remember to back up frequently.

Just in case the worst happens anyway, keep everything backed up. Backup everything multiple times a day. Every time a user saves a file, the system should automatically back it up in multiple locations. Backing up once a day means that you lose that day’s data when your hard drive fails. Remember, every hard drive will fail.

Let's Wrap It up

Maintaining your website's security is as important as creating a secure website in the first place. If you have an E-commerce website, then you definitely need website security.