Tag: 10 Steps to secure your website

secure your website

10 Steps to secure your website

Due to the increase in cyber-attacks as an owner of a website you can’t afford to ignore the risk of security issues present over the internet. According to experts it is said that cybercrime such as committing fraud, trafficking intellectual property, stealing identities, or violating privacy are spreading at a huge rate. 

Using the internet for online presence increased cyber-crimes by 19 times over the last 10 years. The news of data leaks and hacks are always on trend these days. Not only huge earning organizations but also small business enterprises get trapped in cybercrimes. The Website security should be the topmost priority for the owner of the website.

Steps to secure your website

1. Backup

Before starting the workings upon developing a website to assure that it is secured and protected by the malicious activities over the internet it is recommended to create a well-protected backup for the entire website. Cybercrime does not come with a user’s permission so it’s better to have a proper back up so that in case of data breach or data loss it would be beneficial. 

2. Use secure password

Website security depends upon a strong and secured password. A strong password contains a mix of characters and symbols such as underscores, star, hashtags and dollar symbol. It is recommended to have a password which cannot be easily guessed. Weak passwords are more prone to be attacked by the attackers in comparison to strong passwords. Creating a strong password makes the website more secure and protected.

3. Open emails carefully

Phishers mainly use emails and messages to attack a particular website. They send viruses and other malicious software via email and its attachments. It is necessary to be careful while opening emails from unauthorized or unknown people. A hacker can easily damage your website if the user clicks the link or downloads the attached file. Spam guards aren’t enough; proper security measures should be taken by the owner in order to prevent such losses.

4. Regular software updates

Software needs to be updated time to time. Updating software may consume time. There is much software which requires complete restart of the system which hampers productivity. Updates are important as they contain security patches which are important to secure your entire system.  

5. Secure yourself by the excellent hosting services

Hosting services plays a crucial role for maintaining your website security hence choosing the right hosting service and a correct hosting plan is very important. Before moving a website to hosting company one should ask them about their security platform. Mainly a hosting company hires the experts in the field of internet security because they understand the essence of security in the fast growing cybercrime world.

6. Establish security plugins

Security plugins help in securing your site from malicious attacks. If you want your website must be accessible by the viewer then you must take care of the security. Security plugins assure that you are safe from the attackers. Site Lock looks for the malware and viruses on the continuous basis. It provides additional security.

7. SSL Certificate helps in protection

HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. A webpage using this protocol is considered safe and secure. Pages which are uploaded on these servers are well protected. Any page which demands confidential information like bank details needs to be secured by this protocol. Google has marked various sites as insecure as they are not using SSL Certificates or encrypt data.

8. Folders Permission

A website consists of various files and folders which are responsible to make your website work properly. A hacker having the right skills can easily hack all your data and use it for suspicious activities in order to harm you if your files and folders are not secured with proper security methods. To prevent these hacks, go to file manager and change the file attributes, move to numeric values and set 644 for individual files and 755 for files and directories.

9. Run regular security checks

Issues can be rectified easily if small bugs are fixed time to time before they are converted into big havocs. You need a good security check for this which can use monitoring services. You just need to run a test on your website programming on a regular basis; it could be weeks or months. Such monitoring services make it easier to run the website smoothly and effectively. A user just needs to pay attention to the detail report provided by these services and should mark all the issues and rectify them as soon as possible.

10. Incorporating security add-ons

In normal circumstances if your website is built with a content management system (CMS), you have ability to innovatively develop your website with security plugins that are available 24/7 and you actively prevent website hacking attempts. If we deeply comprehend each one of the main CMS toolkit options have security plugins available and are ready to use and on the top of them many of them are for free.

The Security plugins that are available are:-

  • iThemes Security 
  • Bulletproof Security
  • MageFence
  • Sucuri
  • Wordfence
  • fail2Ban
  • JHackGuard
  • jomDefender
  • RSFirewall 
  • Amasty
  • Watchlog Pro
  • Antivirus Website Protection

All these options listed above have their own security options and perks as well. Moreover such options relate the security vulnerabilities inherent in each specific platform, foiling additional types of hacking or pen testing attempts that could threaten your website’s security.

Conclusion 

As a conclusion we can say that all of the above mentioned steps even for website owners with minimal technical experience can be handled relatively easily. In all above mentioned points we looked at a range of issues affecting host and network security for organizations operating web servers.

We got to know that practically even if every business decision that you make for your computers can have significant security impacts for your website as well as for your organization. Many small and even large businesses treat the security of their website as an afterthought, which leads to many problems, as something that can be added after other decisions have already been made, this kind of attitude is particularly costly.