Website breaches and hacks are every owner’s worst nightmare. It doesn’t matter whether you are an experienced owner with several years in the industry or just one building a new website. The risks of getting breached the website security will always be present.
One study states that an average of 30,000 new websites get hacked every day, and yet another report found out that identifying a data breach takes an average of 280 days.
There’s little chance your website will ever be 100% secure. You can use website hosts or Content Management Systems (CMS) to get insights on how best to secure your website. However, the security and safety of your website are your responsibility.
Why Do You Need to Keep Your Website Secure?
Before you know what strategies to use to protect your website from a breach, you should understand why you need to upgrade its security and what happens if you don’t.
The primary intent of protecting your new website is to safeguard valuable data such as your customer’s payment details from falling into the wrong hands. Potential customers do not trust an unsecure site and such sites experience many problems, including expensive coding repairs and less traffic.
Without proper security measures, your website will be vulnerable to various hacks such as;
Injection Hacks – This attack targets the database by inserting a code that discloses confidential data. This kind of breach allows the hacker to access and modify the site’s data and compromise its operation.
Phishing – The hacker takes the identity of your business and tries to get your customers to share personal information.
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) – Commonly known as the Trojan horse breach. It involves the hacker feeding a code into the site or modifying the content to lure visitors into giving sensitive information.
Fuzzing Hack – Hackers use the fuzzing technique to identify a website’s weak spots. They input a significant amount of random data into the site to crash then use a particular tool to check for weaknesses.
Denial of Service Attack(DOS) – This aims to keep a site offline by overloading the target website with requests to crash the web server and make it unavailable.
Gibberish Hack – Hackers create pages within your site and fill them with effective keywords and gibberish so that they rank high on SERPs. Once users click on these pages, they get redirected to insecure sites.
Brute Force Hack – The hacker tries to access users’ accounts by guessing usernames and passwords.
5 Best Ways to Keep Your Website Secure
While it might be impossible to be safe from the risks of a website breach completely, you can at least put structures in place to reduce the chances. Ensuring a website is always secure and protected will not be as easy as creating it. However, with the steps discussed in this article, you’ll be able to understand better ways of keeping your website secure.
Use HTTPS and SSL Certificate
A secure website URL should use HTTPS as opposed to HTTP. Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure(HTTPS) is a security measure that protects web content from interceptions.
In addition, a web owner should use the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate to protect customers’ personal information. SSL helps in encrypting sensitive data and prevents others from accessing it.
If your site asks visitors for personal information like payment detail, you must encrypt the data using an SSL certificate that protects it from hackers.
HTTPS and SSL certificates also prevent unauthorized people from accessing the website’s data.
Choose Strong Incorruptible Passwords
The easiest way to create a vulnerability in your website is to allow weak passwords. Hackers, including amateurs, will always try guessing users’ passwords to gain access to personal information. Thus if your website allows predictable passwords, you will be at risk of significant attacks.
Set password rules and practices for your visitors, such as using a combination of random symbols, numbers and letters, long passwords, and unrelated phrases. Additionally, warn your users never to use personal information as passwords.
There are numerous tips for creating strong passwords. Adopt the ones that seem clever and combine them to develop a unique set.
Update Your Website Software Regularly
Content Management System(CMS) is a valuable tool in creating and managing your website. However, it is an open-source software whose code can crack easily under an attack. Hackers can easily break the code and access your website data.
To ensure proper website security, ensure all platforms, plugins, and software you’ve installed are regularly updated. For instance, if you are using WordPress, you can always take a few minutes to check whether you’re up to date through the update icon next to your name.
If the manual updates seem troublesome, you can easily set automatic updates in your site’s dashboard. This will simplify the process and cover for when you forget to do it manually. Just remember to check if they are well up to date.
Set Regular Website Backups
Website servers can crash due to breaches and hacks. To avoid losing all your website data and the hard work during a catastrophe, you need to create copies. A backup system is the best way to ensure you can find and restore essential files, content, and materials. It shields you from the time-consuming and redundant process of data recovery.
Create a trustworthy space for your backup, such as the central server, and protect it from future threats. You can make the backup process automatic.
Choose a Trustworthy Web Host
A web host is the ‘home’ where your website stays in the online platform. Therefore you must do proper research before rendering your web to just any host. For a new website, you have several web hosting options to use. Examine the benefits and strong points of each before making a choice.
The deciding factor of a web host you’ll use is the amount and level of security features that it offers. Ask questions such as does it have a Web Application Firewall (WAF) or a Secure File Transfer Protocol(SFTP)? Does it offer website backup services? Is there protection against Denial-of-Service(DDoS)?
Whether you choose Bluehost, SiteGround, or GoDaddy as your hosting, make sure it is capable of keeping your site safe and secure.
In Conclusion
As a website owner, you are responsible for keeping your site’s data safe and secure. This will assure visitors of the safety of their personal information, especially when making online card payments. Thus, do not just create a new site and forget about the most critical element, which is keeping it secure. Follow the tips in this article and set up security standards that are hard to crack. If you need help building your first website or keeping it secure from hackers, contact us for actionable plans.