Your website is the heart of your business, the landing page for most consumers who look you up, the place you direct potential customers and the location of your sales. For this reason, keeping your website secure is of the utmost importance at all times. More than just keeping your content and personal property safe, a secure website has the needs of the customer in mind. Keeping your website secure means protecting your customers’ data and personal information from any attempts to take it over or to gain access to sensitive data.
If your website is vulnerable, you may be susceptible to all sorts of different attacks, from DDoS attacks, which are designed to slow your website down and stop it from running properly, effectively costing you sales and customers, to hackers placing code on your site which requests information from users so that they can steal sensitive data from them.Â
A customer will not interact with a site they don’t deem to be safe, so securing your website and proving it to your customers will help to improve brand trust and build confidence in your business as a whole.
Keep your site as secure as you possibly can for the good of both you and your customers, and prove to your consumers that you are a brand that can be trusted and that you will take all of the steps that you can to protect customer information.
5 tips for securing your website
We’ve put together a list of 5 different tips and tricks to help you secure your website today, so keep reading to discover what you can do to improve the security of your site and keep yourself and your customers safe.
- Make use of an SSL certificate
Keeping your customers’ information safe and secure should be your number one priority when you’re trying to secure your website. One of the easiest ways to achieve this is by using an SSL connection on your website. A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a method of encrypting all information whenever a connection is made between a consumer’s browser and your web host’s server. This stops any personal data, form submissions or sensitive information from being stolen during transmission.
Whenever a customer submits one of the forms on your website, all collected data is encrypted while it travels to the other end of the connection, where it is then translated back to the data it started with. This keeps customer information safe and prevents anyone from being able to access it.
Providing an official SSL certificate is a great way to prove to your customers that your site is safe and secure and will increase customer trust, provided the SSL certificate comes from a reputable and verified source.
- Use a website vulnerability checker
A great way to prove the strength and security of your website is to make use of a website vulnerability checker. This will search your website for any potential vulnerabilities that could prove to be a security risk for your site. This could include things such as an insecure HTTP header or outdated server software. Using a website scanner will help you to identify any security risks that exist on your website which could pose a threat to your customers, their data or your business’s data. This means you are able to rectify any areas that aren’t working and make changes to improve the security of your site.
- Introduce a strict password policy
If you have a website that makes use of a Content Management System (CMS), it is likely that there will be a dashboard somewhere that allows anyone from your company with access to your site the ability to change your site. Because of this, each person with access will have made their own passwords. Although it is tempting to allow staff to make their own passwords that are easy to remember, this could lead to a potential security risk if someone was to guess or hack the website. To combat this, make sure you implement a strict policy when it comes to password creation so that nobody is putting the security of your website at risk.
- Keep everything up to date
Technology is constantly evolving, and this means that there are constantly new threats emerging in code and computer systems. To keep your website secure from constant new vulnerabilities, you should be sure to keep all of your software up to date. Make sure you stay ahead of the game by including new protections against each threat that emerges, as hackers will look to target sites that are out of date as they are much more susceptible to attacks. Be sure to backup your website and content regularly to keep your data safe and perform regular updates to your software so that your site and the customers who use it are well protected against as many threats as possible.
- Make use of a reliable web hosting service
When you’re trying to build a secure website, you need to start with a secure framework. To do this, be sure to choose a good hosting service that will not only prioritize security but also force all users to be safe too.
There are so many different hosting services out there which all have different features, and many of them will require users to keep hosting packages up to date to continue use, and others provide users with the ability to test their sites before updates are released to give them a chance to optimize security. There are others still which provide users with automated updates to all plugins they supply to them so that they are always up to date and, therefore, as safe as possible for the user. A solid and secure web hosting service provides your website with a strong backbone on which to build even more secure practices and really work to keep your customers and their data safe.
Also Read: Web Security Vulnerabilities
