Ultimate website security tips that will protect your business

Website security needs to be taken seriously. It can take months, if not years, to accumulate SEO results which make your site highly competitive. And a hacker can make all that go away in a matter of moments if they somehow gain access to your site! This is admittedly not very common, but the alternative is even worse. After all, most hackers aim to steal private information rather than just crash websites. And this is something that can be very hard to detect, so you might not even know you got hacked. To prevent all this, we’ve put together a guide on ultimate website security tips that will protect your business.

Have your data encrypted

The first of our ultimate website security tips is to always have your site’s data encrypted. This means enabling HTTPS and having an SSL Certificate installed, too. What this does is properly encrypt any data transferred between a server and a client, meaning your website and a user’s browser or even mail. As any professional digital marketing agency NYC can attest, this is crucial for any business but especially important for eCommerce businesses. Running an online store without this protection could easily result in disaster for both you and your customers.

Use double authentication

Double authentication can often slow things down a little and seem inconvenient. After all, having to both remember a password and fetch a code from your email or phone is annoying. Not to mention that quite a few are rather severely timed, and even a ten-second delay would necessitate sending a new code. However, this is, without a doubt, one of the best possible methods you can opt for to keep access to your website protected. Unless a hacker can get their hands on one of your employee’s phones or access their email, they will absolutely not be able to get into your site.

Prevent brute force methods

You should also make sure that you are protected from most “brute force” hacking methods. They simply rely on overwhelming your website with login attempts. There are two methods to stop this from working. First, you have human authentication. This ensures that no bot is being used to attack your website and take up precious resources. The second thing that often works to solve this issue is imposing a timer on everyone who fails to log in before they can attempt again. Even just making it so that people can only try once every fifteen seconds can stop your website server from being crashed.

Get a security plugin

One of the important ultimate website security tips we have to offer you is to find a WordPress security plugin you like. As any reputable web development company New York can tell you, there is no ‘perfect’ plugin on the market. You must simply find one which fits your needs and budget. There are, however, several which can contend for the title. Wordfence, Jetpack, Sucuri, and All in One WP Security & Firewall are just some examples. Each has a unique approach to billing, and some offer rather different approaches to security, too. So, make sure to check all the options before settling on anyone.

Keep your plugins updated

Note that even if you only install trusted plugins with relatively good security, there is a risk you need to account for: version updates. Plugin updates are not just made in order to improve the functionality of the plugin. Quite often, they are done in order to improve their security, too. Even if the update’s focus is not security, developers pay a lot less attention to the protection of an old version’s code. This means that if you are running behind on your updates, hackers can eventually use them as backdoors into your site. This is one of the risks that web design services NYC like to warn their customers off, especially if they have any plugins embedded into their sites.

Know the best approach to passwords

Another of our ultimate website security tips is to educate your employees on how to manage their passwords. Now, obviously, you don’t want to just leave your password lying around on a sticky note next to your computer. And yet, this may actually be less risky than saving it on auto-fill of whatever browser you are using! Hackers can absolutely get their hands on that data. Which means you would be handing them access to your site on a platter.

Never save passwords to anything which you view as important or irreplaceable. Note, too, that you should avoid using duplicate passwords or having one password for everything. Password leaks are relatively common. And if there’s a password directly associated with your email, you’ll be sure hackers will try it first.

Treat email security seriously

Someone getting into your email is almost worse than them hacking your website. With a simple request to recover a forgotten password, they can cause a ton of issues. If you don’t have two-step authentication which relies on a mobile phone device, then they would definitely get access to your site, too. Along with any and all accounts you have registered for through your email. And that’s on top of all the data and private correspondence they’d be able to steal.

Always have backup data

The final of our ultimate website security tips is to always have backup data for your site. This will serve two purposes. First, lots of plugins provide passive scanning of backups looking for malware and similarly harmful tricks. Second, if the worst does happen and your site is hacked, you can restore things relatively quickly by relying on the backup. Another thing to note is that a New York City SEO expert will typically advise you to have backups too, simply because they make managing SEO content much easier if there is a problem caused by a hack or just editing issues.

Final comment

We hope that using our ultimate website security tips that will protect your business will let you avoid any and all problems related to hacking. Even if something does happen, don’t panic. Even the worst-case scenario will simply force you to bring your site back using your backup. Of course, the lost uptime and stolen data are not as easy to make up for.