Owning a website for your business is a major and a bold step to the success of your website. A website connects you quickly with the entire globe. You could create your website to serve a million of your reasons as you please. You can use your website to sell your products, advertise and market your goods and services. There are no boundaries to what a website can do. Building a website is, therefore, an essential step to the success of your online business and such a wise thought. Owning a website means your customers can find you at any time, even during weekends and non-working hours. Your customers can as well do whatever they want in the comfort of their homes. The need and essence for websites have been brought about majorly by the increased number of internet usages across the globe. We Are Social Global Digital Report 2019 specifies that an average internet user spends 6.5 hours online every day.
Best 6 Ways To Secure Your Website
However, owning a website comes with numerous challenges posed by Cyber insecurities that are currently on the rise. A Clark School study at the University of Maryland now shows that there is a hack attempt for every 39 seconds that pass. This article shares six of the most crucial steps to take while building your website. Measures that will ensure your website are not susceptible to cybersecurity threats.
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Limit The Access To Your Website
Not everyone should be allowed to visit your website. It would help if you thought of who is entitled to use your website. Granting full access to the site will only invite the many hackers that are full on the internet. Every freedom of access that you give to the public only creates another loophole for your website to be accessed. And when they do, believe me, you will not like it.
To those that are granted authority to access your website, you will have to educate them on how best they should conduct themselves while dealing with the site to remain secure. It will help if you put stringent policies such as those that limit them from using public connections and those that only allow for the use of strong passwords. It will ensure that your website remains safe, away from the reach of the hackers.
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Integrate your website with a Secure Sockets Layer Certificate(SSL certificate)
Having an SSL certificate ensures that the communication between you and your clients is encrypted and therefore secure. All communication between you and them is secured by an end to end encryption and therefore can hardly be hacked. You should be more concerned about your data security, by implementing SSL Security; you’ll get a higher security ranking. Having an SSL certificate is a proof of trust, authentication, future proof of business continuation, and brand power. It improves the trust and confidence of your customers in you and a necessity for payment acceptance. When you think of an SSL certificate, you can consider the Comodo SSL certificate that is one of the best SSL that you can go for while setting up your website. It is a perfect security booster for your website. It offers unique services that separate it from the rest.
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Be Password Conscious
There’s no doubt that the best password is absolute security for your website. Cyber attackers occasionally target passwords and authentication details. Your website’s data and login credentials must be secure and encrypted. Therefore embracing the best Password practices is necessary to ensure the security of your website can never be breached. Implement robust password policies. Strong passwords must be a minimum of eight characters; it should be in numerals, blended with alphabets, numbers, and other special characters. Ensure that passwords are never shared; neither are they written down by your employees and website managers.
Adopting bi authentication is another key step to password security. Bi authenticity serves as an additional layer of protection where users need to fill the second layer of security credentials before being granted access to the website. For instance, one may be required to fill in the name of his pet before finally accessing the account. This step adds a vital security layer to your website.
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Develop a Back-up for your important files
While creating your website, you realize that you may fall at risk of losing all your data, including that of your customers, vital files, and the businesses’ information at an unprecedented moment. You are not immune to cyber risks. This is despite the level of security measures that you might have put in place. Hackers might target your website to distort, steal, delete, or leak your information. Hackers may end up locking you up from your site and get into full control of it. Losing data could give you a headache if you failed to plan. Data could also be lost due to human error and hardware failure.
The question is what now after a successful data breach has happened to my website? Backing up your website’s data will help you beat such fatalities. Back-ups will help you recover lost data if anything happens, such as a successful data breach. Make sure that you store the back-up file at a safe place, far from the reach of cybercriminals.
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Enable a Multiple Factor Authentication
Just having to enter your username and password can never be enough. You need a new user authentication process to ensure that only authorized users can access the website. This is where the multiple-step authentications come in hand.
A multiple step authentication is where a user is allowed to input another code that is usually sent to his email or mobile number via a text message. The code is required to be entered within a specific period. Enabling a two-step authentication is a crucial security feature that you should take note of when building your website.
- Deter Users from Uploading files
While building your website, make it in a way that blocks your customers and visitors from uploading unwanted files and data. The concept behind this precaution is that an uploaded file could be used to inject your website with viruses and malware that, when exclusively executed on your website, opens it up to hackers. The most recommended solution is to prevent your users’ direct access to upload and upload files that will prevent users from uploading data. If you allow files to be uploaded to your website, ensure that you use safe fetching methods such as SFTP and SSH that filter what type of data is uploaded to the site.
- Hire Cybersecurity Experts
By consulting experts, you can ensure your website stays safe alongside your business. Experts have extensive knowledge and a variety of methods for evaluating the current state of your business and implementing changes to keep it secure. This does not have to be limited to the website. If you have an app, for example, experts can perform source code analysis to determine whether the code contains vulnerabilities that could compromise the app. Consulting experts can be expensive, but when compared to the potential disaster of cyberattacks, it is unquestionably the best solution.
Wrapping it up
Creating a website is a critical process that should be done with a cautious mind. Your site may be compromised at any time, and this can lead to some devastating outcomes. Hackers want to hack your site to steal your data or deform the structure of your website and use it as spam to send emails or set up a webserver to send illegal files. To be on the safe side, you have to put proper measures in place when building your website. This article explains some of the necessary steps that you should put in place to create a secure website.