How To Make Your Website Secure

How To Make Your Website Secure

Written by: dapa Posted on: 27th November 2016 Share this post:

Websites are constantly changing, and keeping your website up to scratch with your competitors can be a real fuss if you don’t have the skills to do so. However, making your website pretty is not the main factor of a website.

An insecure website is like sticking a pile of cash in your living room and leaving all your windows and doors open, if the wrong person sees “the cash” it won’t be there for much longer. It’s the same with a website, people hack websites for various different reasons: to be malicious, to add backlinks to their own website or to gain access to customers and orders.

Making your site safe and secure can be easy by making a few simple and easy changes, although most of the time it is overlooked by web developers as it is something you can’t physically see and most developer’s way of thinking is “If you can’t see it then it’s not there”.

Purchase an SSL Certificate

An SSL certificate is a cheap and easy way to make your website safe and secure as it encrypts the submitted data from forms so it is unreadable to the human eye such as a password which says “password123” will be encrypted to something that looks like this: “EnCt2c65e71c2a7ddc21547465e2af7e82a67f80d6b67c65e71c2a7ddc21547465e2a4oWkSPJdrAH”.

However, if you are using an unsecure / public network and submit a form on a website without an SSL certificate it will send the data unencrypted and a hacker on the network will be able to see the password, username and URL of the form you submitted which essentially gives them full access to your site, the investment into an SSL certificate can cost as little as £5 a year.

Change Your Admin URL

In WordPress the generic WordPress login in /wp-admin or /admin there is a plugin called Protect Your Admin this will eliminate the majority of Content Management System hackers as they will have to pass the hurdle of figuring out what your admin URL is.

Update Your Website
Keeping your website updated to the latest version will also make your website more secure and fix other bugs that may occur with your website.

Secure Your FTP

FTP is the core of your website, if someone gains access to your FTP they can get access to orders, encrypted passwords, users, clients, content and all other files on your website including database access.
To keep it as secure as possible it would be beneficial to connect via SFTP instead of FTP for the same reasons you should be using an SSL certificate.

Remove Zip / Backup Files From The Site

Removing Zip files and backups from the root of your site Is crucial to stop people from duplicating / stealing your website, not only will they be able to instantly copy your site to exact pixel measures they will also have the database file which will lead to the person having access to your database, orders and clients.

Use Secure Passwords For Absolutely Everything

Using a secure password will help protect your site from brute force attacks as it adds another layer of security to your website, try to keep your passwords above 12 characters and include capital letters and special characters such as

( !”£$%^&*;:’@#~][}{,.<>)

to get a secure password generated for you either headbutt the keyboard multiple times or to make life easier just use a password generator.

Following these tips will make your site near bulletproof, and prevent anyone stealing your information stored on your website, so wave goodbye to those sleepless nights of worrying about your website getting destroyed by a hairy teenager living in his mums house.

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