Blog Post

What You Need to Keep Your Website Secure

Tracy Pyke • January 6, 2022

Cybersecurity is a relatively new field in the world that has never been more important to any online business. There are few things that are as catastrophic in the short and long term to your business success as a cybersecurity attack or data breach. Maintaining cybersecurity to keep your website safe may be important, and yet many people don’t understand the most effective ways to keep your website safe and secure. If this sounds like you, then you need to follow these eight tips to keep your website as secure as possible.

Use HTTPS

If you have a business, you might be familiar with HTTP, or hypertext transfer protocol, the basic system for communication across computer networks on the internet. HTTPS is a further extension and upgrade upon HTTP, which stands for hypertext transfer protocol secure. As the name implies, there is an added layer of security called TLS, or transport layer security. HTTPS encrypts the data that is being sent to protect against cyberattacks on your data. If your website is communicating any sort of private or confidential data, and you are doing it over HTTP instead of HTTPS, then you are leaving your website in a precarious position for security.

Update Your Plugins

Security plugins are additional add-ons for your website that helps to protect your website and data from attacks. But as any sort of security software or plugin ages, hackers get more and more adept at finding their weak spots, and exploiting them for their personal gain. If you aren’t regularly updating your plug ins, you might as well not have them at all. Plug-ins regularly receive updates to patch the weak spots that have been discovered to keep your security system several steps ahead of hackers and cybercriminals that are trying to get to your private and valuable data and information. Don’t fall victim to laziness and stay up to date with your plug-ins.

Use Good Passwords

This is a basic security tip, but it is an important one that many people ignore. You must use good and effective passwords on your website to ensure that your information is secure and safe from hackers. Many hackers only need to guess your password to get access to your entire set of information that you are trying to keep private. Why bother with all sorts of other cybersecurity features if you are going to use an easy to guess password? Make sure that you are using passwords with varying type cases, numbers, special characters, and a proper length to ensure that your password is impossible to guess.

Use Cybersecurity Services

You should consider hiring cybersecurity experts to implement cybersecurity features on your website if you don’t feel confident in doing your own cybersecurity. Small to medium-sized businesses are most vulnerable to IT breaches. But this tends to be because small to medium-sized businesses often have less effective cybersecurity than larger businesses that dedicate tons of money to cybersecurity. In order to keep your website as secure as possible, while remaining cost effective, you should seriously consider using cybersecurity services who can help you keep your business secure.

Don't Save User Payment Data

The riskiest data to have saved in your website and servers is user payment information. If you are going to save user payment data, then you better have excellent cybersecurity. But another option that you can use to keep your user’s payment data safe is to not save it on your website servers. While this may make your customers experience slightly longer if they must re-enter card information every time, it does significantly increase their security when using your website. Plus, with advancements in digital wallets, many customers' devices will save their data for them anyway, still streamlining their purchase process, making payment data saving far less essential for your website.

Firewalls

Try to get your website using firewalls asap. You should apply for a web application firewall, or WAF for short. This will add an extra wall of protection for your website between your data and server, protecting one of the main channels through which hackers try to steal data and information. There are several WAFs that you can apply for, and they are easy to install and implement once you have gotten them. If you don’t have firewalls setup already for your business website, then you are behind the curve. Firewalls, WAFs are industry standard for firewall security.

Two-Step Authentication

Two-step authentication has only become more popular over time and is becoming the standard identity verification system for website data. Two step verifications simply means that rather than just a password or fingerprint scan for access, there are two steps to authenticating your identity and gaining access. The most common type of two step verification involves entering your password, and then a site will send a private one-time pin number via text or email to your saved device for that service, and you will have to enter this separate, private information to gain access. Consider upgrading your password system to a two-step system to further increase security and put distance between yourself and hackers.

Backup Frequently

The last and arguably most essential step to IT security is to back up your website frequently. And frequently really means frequently. You should be backing up your website as often as you are updating your website. This ensures that if an update takes place that has major bugs or other issues or has a security flaw that is noticed after implementation that requires you to take down your website briefly, that you have a copy of the most recent version of your website to get back up and running right away. When you don’t have up to date backups, it can make getting your website back up and running incredibly difficult, time consuming, and more stressful than it needs to be. Back up your data and save the last fifteen to thirty backups so that you are prepared.


Cybersecurity is essential for any small or medium sized business. But knowing how best to protect your business from cybersecurity threats can be difficult. Follow these eight tips to ensure that your website is properly secured against hackers.


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