With the number of cyber threats seemingly ever-increasing, it is important to take website security seriously. Even if you don’t store lots of customer information or private data on your web servers, being subject to a hack can leave your website down for days or even weeks, impacting your business operations severely. What should you do to make sure your website is resilient enough to withstand an attack? Read on to find out.
Make Use of Professional Hosting Services
Given the problems some institutions in Texarkana have suffered from cyber incidents, building security into your site is crucial if you are not going to have to abandon your current site as lost to vandals and cyber criminals. This need not mean investing a great deal in IT security on your part, however. This is because choosing a professional web hosting service that stores your site on a third-party server for you typically also means benefiting from a raft of security measures. In other words, if you host your website on your own server, you are going to have to keep updating all of the necessary security patches that are needed today to keep hackers at bay. With a web hosting service, on the other hand, all of this is taken care of for you, usually for a straightforward monthly fee which also guarantees your website will remain up even if there were to be a power outage in the area.
Obtain an SSL Certificate
If you obtain an SSL certificate for your site, you are – in effect – registering it as a bona fide website. What this means is that you will then be able to offer your clients encryption. This is important for any website that takes people’s personal information and records it. For example, if you have a contact form on your site, then it could be being read by hackers who are collecting your client’s email addresses and names. With SSL certification, however, their data would be encrypted meaning it wouldn’t be readable to anyone else even if they were to intercept it as it was bing input. Of course, this level of protection is even more crucial for sites with e-commerce platforms that take payments by customers entering their credit card details.
Improve Your Password Protection
One of the major problems with website security occurs when someone unauthorised can log in as the site’s administrator. If you have administrative rights to your site and the ability to make changes to it, then ensure your password isn’t weak. Use a password generator instead of something memorable you have made up yourself. Even better, opt for multi-factor authentication. If you get a text message to confirm it is you trying to log into your site, then it will only take a few seconds to jump through this additional security hoop. Without such a measure, conversely, you may be leaving your site wide open to access from accomplished hackers.
Conclusion
Website security needn’t take a high level of IT training because so much can be taken care of for you. Don’t assume your site is safe because it hasn’t been hacked before because less secure sites are always targetted regardless of their size and complexity.
