Having an online presence is essential if you wish to grow your business by leaps and bounds. It allows a relevant audience to find you with ease and get to know what you have to offer.
Therefore, it's highly recommended to have a fully functional website for your business. It will help enhance your reach and enable you to capture quality leads.
However, there is a flipside to everything. Having a website may help you get more business, but it also makes you susceptible to cyber threats.
Therefore, you should always prioritize making your website secure. Not only will this help you keep your data safe, but it will also protect sensitive information about your customers.
Here are six effective tips to secure your website:
1. Select a Reliable Hosting Service
A common mistake businesses make, especially those that have just gotten started, is selecting a subpar hosting service when launching a website.
They do this to ensure that the hosting they choose is easy on the wallet. Little do they know that they may have to pay a huge price for making a poor decision.
It's very important to choose a trusted and reliable hosting service when launching a website for your business.
Trusted hosting service providers ensure that your information is protected at all times, as they invest heavily to ensure data security. They maintain their servers, run regular security checks, and take appropriate measures to minimize the risk of data breaches.
Having a subpar hosting service may expose your website to security vulnerabilities and compromise the user experience by increasing your website's load time.
It's reported that a 1-second delay in your site's load time may cause a drop in conversions by 7%. So, the selection of a poor hosting service may have a severe impact on your brand's reputation and your revenue.
2. Use a Strong Password
One of the most basic yet effective methods to protect your website from cyberattacks is to choose a strong password.
Setting a simple password is like an open invitation to hackers and cybercriminals. They can easily crack it and access your valuable data.
So, your password should be complex and comprise a combination of letters, numbers, and symbols.
Having a complex password makes it hard to crack and adds an extra layer to your security. So, come with one yourself or generate it using a password generator.
3. Use Two-Factor Authentication
The more secure your website is, the better. So, why stop at just having a strong password? It's highly recommended that you implement two-factor authentication to take your website's security up a notch.
Two-factor authentication adds an additional step to the authorization process. It requires two different forms of identification to allow access to the required information.
The most common methods for implementing two-factor authentication are SMS and email. Here, you get a code through SMS on your phone or in your email.
To access the required information, you will have to enter the code you just received along with your password.
Implementing two-factor authentication serves two purposes. First, it serves as an additional barrier for hackers or cybercriminals who want to access your data.
Second, it alerts you about the unauthorized access as you receive the code the moment someone enters the password.
4. Keep Your CMS Up-to-Date
If you use a CMS to manage your website's content, it's best to keep it up-to-date to protect your site from security vulnerabilities.
Around 64% of businesses use WordPress as the content management system for their websites. However, you're free to choose from other alternatives if they serve your needs better.
No matter which CMS you use, it's important to keep an eye on the updates and install them as soon as you can.
The purpose of releasing these updates is to ensure that you offer a glitch-free experience through your website. Plus, they take care of any security vulnerabilities and keep your information safe from cyberattacks.
5. Leverage a Web Application Firewall
Using a web application firewall is an effective measure you should consider taking to protect your website from security threats.
The firewall continuously monitors your traffic and looks for any malicious attacks. As soon as it detects any security threat, the firewall deals with it and keeps your information secure.
One of the ways hackers compromise your security is by sending malicious traffic your way. These types of attacks generally target web applications and make your site vulnerable.
A web application firewall may help you stop attacks like distributed denial-of-service, cross-site scripting, SQL injection, and more. So, it's highly recommended that you consider using it to protect your information.
6. Install an SSL Certificate
To secure your website from unauthorized access and protect your data, it's important that you consider installing an SSL certificate.
An SSL certificate encrypts the data transmitted between your website and the server. So, even if it's intercepted somewhere in between, the hackers won't be able to make sense of anything.
All they would see is a complex code that is almost impossible to decipher without the private key.
So, even after all your security measures fail, you can still protect your data from unauthorized use by getting an SSL certificate.
SSL implementation not only secures your website data, but it may also help you increase your online presence.
Search engine giants like Google prefer websites with SSL certificates over those that don't. So, implementing SSL may help you stand out from the crowd and rank higher than your competitors.
Final Words
There you have it: the six effective tips to make your website secure.
If you have been facing issues with your website's security and want to protect your data, the recommendations in this article may come in handy.
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