Those visiting your website expect that it will be a secure, positive experience, and it should be. Keeping their data safe and their interactions with your website will keep visitors coming and establish your company as trustworthy. Read on to learn more about what hazards to guard your website against, and tools and practices to protect your online presence.
Hazards of an Unsecured Website
While there’s no such thing as 100% security, it is possible to make your website more difficult to breach. Websites are prime targets for bad actors, who hope to get confidential business information, especially payment card data, as well as launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in an attempt to cripple websites. Not only that, but malware can enter an unsecured website and make it a hub for distributing that malware to customers’ devices. Weak login credentials can facilitate brute-force attacks, where hackers try numerous user identification and passwords to hack into a website. Aside from these threats, a website that even appears insecure can make visitors reluctant to interact with it.
Website Security is Worth the Effort
Not only is maintaining your website’s security a reassurance to visitors, it helps your business. Google factors security – especially a security socket layer (SSL) certificate indicated by “https”–in its search engine rankings. The more secure your website, the higher it ranks, and the more visible it is. The primary benefit of obtaining an SSL certificate is the encryption of data traveling between a website and its visitors. As a result, attackers find it more difficult to steal important information. The certification is fairly easy to obtain, being a part of many website plans.
Best Practices for Keeping Your Website Safe
Along with an SSL certificate, certain best practices will help you keep your website safe from attack. Keeping the platform up-to-date with content management updates on WordPress and updates to the latest operating system will help keep your site secure. So will using a web-based firewall like Cloudflare. Using strong login credentials like a distinctive username and unique password, making them hard for bad actors to guess. Passwords that include upper- and lower-case letters, symbols and numbers and at least twelve characters are more resistant to brute-force attacks. Choosing a trusted theme from WordPress instead of a null theme possibly containing malicious code is another easy way to protect your website. Finally, using a virtual private network (VPN) when accessing a website on a public network adds another protective layer of encryption.
With websites a central part of how companies do business, yours must be secure. To learn more about a website security audit, contact ClikCloud today.
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