Website Security: How to Secure and Protect Your Website

As a business owner or an executive, your plate is full of many big and small things. You have to worry about marketing and sales during unprecedented times with customers whose demographics change from year to year. 

That’s not all. Add website security to that to-do list as well.

It’s not something you think about often. But every time you read the news about yet another bank getting hacked or another gamut of businesses’ customer information being leaked, your mind starts racing again. Is your website completely secure, you wonder?

How would you even know? Is there any way to check if your website is secure? And if not, how to make a website secure? These are some of the questions that you might be pondering. 

According to this report by Accenture, humans are still the weakest link in cybersecurity. There has been a 67% increase in security breaches over the past five years. That’s no laughing matter. Cybercriminals are getting smarter, so you have to get even smarter.

Read on to see some top tips on how to make a website secure from cybercriminals. 

1. Use Security Plugins

If you are using a content management system (CMS), like WordPress, or something similar, it’s quite easy to add a security plugin that would work with your website and protect it from hackers.

There are dozens of great ones out there, so choose the one that works best for your needs and website structure.

2. Use an SSL Certificate

You’ve seen this on other websites before – there’s an S after the HTTP. That ‘S’ indicates that this website has an SSL certificate associated with it, which makes it more secure. 

A lot of e-commerce websites and websites that allow customers to submit credit card information on their websites have these SSL certificates to make the transactions more secure.

But you don’t need to use the SSL certificate for eCommerce alone. Any website can be secured through the use of SSL certificates. And they are quite easy to buy and apply to your website.

You can probably do it directly through your hosting service. 

3. Change Your Passwords Often

This has to be drummed into your head and all your employees’ heads as well. People are still using ‘123456’ and ‘password’ as their passwords. This is in 2020, when cybersecurity threats are increasing rapidly.

2,543,285 people chose ‘123456’ as their password!! Could there be a worse password to use?

Thankfully, this is an easy fix to make. Change your password to something harder to hack, and change it frequently, at least every 45 to 90 days. Most people forget to do this, so having an automated reminder to change passwords is a great tactic.

Using phrases and numbers in combination is the best idea – it’s easy to remember and hard to hack. Something like ‘thef0xateM84days.’

4. Fix Your Weakest Link – Train Your Employees

It’s not only passwords that your employees are fudging. It’s other things as well. With the advent of remote work and contracting, employees are using their laptops and devices to log on to sensitive servers and platforms. 

Not only that, but this means that they are probably using the same device to browse the Internet and Netflix. All this increases the risk of some virus or malware being uploaded onto your CMS or website, without the employee’s knowledge. 

It’s not like they are doing this intentionally. It’s that people tend to get lazy with cybersecurity measures after a few weeks. It is a normal human tendency.

But that means it needs to be buffered up with regular training. Getting together human resources, IT, and management will help shore up cybersecurity training for all in the company. 

5. Keep All Your Software and Platforms Updated

Your website security is at risk if you are not keeping all your software and platforms updated. There is a reason why software gets regular updates from the makers.

They are doing this to ensure that they stay ahead of the curve and ahead of the cybercriminals’ agendas. 

You might imagine that it’s a huge pain in the behind to update all your software on your website every single time an update comes around (sometimes every other day).

But it’s a necessity if you want to prevent the claws of cybercriminals from getting at your website’s internal workings. 

6. Lockdown Your File Permissions and Directory

This might look like gibberish to you, but if you have a CMS on which your website sits, you will need to learn where your file permissions and directory sit. 

Basically, your website is a series of files and folders (like Microsoft Word files, but more complicated) that sit on your CMS. 

These files and folders have permissions related to them, i.e, restrictions on who is allowed to read, write, and work upon these files and folders. 

This means that you need to ensure that very few people besides you and the IT person are allowed to tamper with these files. That’s an essential trick in the cybersecurity rulebook. 

7. Set up Automatic Backups on Your Website

The problem with cybersecurity is that you might do everything right and still get your website hacked by some savvy hacker. Well, that wouldn’t hurt so bad if you had backups of your website stored somewhere else securely.

If you have automatic backups set up, your website can be restored using the backup in a short time, resulting in less downtime for your website and thus less sales and customer loss on your end. 

That’s good news you could do with, especially if your website has been hacked.

Website Security Isn’t as Difficult as You Think

If you’ve been sweating buckets at the thought of beefing up your website security, don’t worry anymore. It’s not as bad as you might imagine. 

There are many agencies out there that are well-equipped to deal with your website security if you aren’t up to the task. 

If you’ve got any concerns around your website, system security or are looking to offload this responsibility, check out our maintenance services at Cefar.

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