5 Tips to Keep Your Website Secure in 2020
Your website is the fundamental component of your online presence. Whether it’s for your business, a personal portfolio or a hobby blog, it’s likely to be the focal point of contact between your brand and the audience you’re trying to reach. A well-built site will attract and convert customers in any industry.
Like all valuable things, however, a good site will naturally be a target of hackers who would want to deface it, place spammy links on it or hold it till you pay a ransom. In fact, a study from earlier this year showed that more than 150,000 small-business websites could be infected with malware at any given moment in the U.S. alone. Any one of those occurrences could be devastating for your brand, so here are a few of the way you can prevent hackers from gaining access to your site.
1. Use a secure password.
Ordinarily, this should be a no-brainer, but you’d be shocked at the number of people who use basic passwords such as “Password” (yes, really) for secure logins. The password should be a complex one, ideally made up of multiple random words along with figures and special characters. That way, it’d be an arduous task to guess or break it with a brute-force program.
To make things even easier, you could use a password-management app, which will likely suggest choosing complex passwords, saving them and having them be filled in automatically so you don’t have to remember them. You might have to pay an upfront or subscription fee, but it’ll be well worth it.
2. Keep all software updated.
Regardless of the platform on which you chose to host your site, updates are a persistent fact of a webmaster’s life. Check regularly for updates to your server’s operating system, plugins and other software. According to Siney Mojica, CEO of TechSavvy, “Many of those updates will include fixes to security lapses, and failure to update promptly will leave your site open to attacks. Hackers scan thousands of sites in hours looking for websites that have vulnerabilities in their software, so you need to stay on top of your game too.”
5. Back up regularly.
If all the prior precautions fail and you still find yourself faced with a hacking, only a recent backup can help you recover fully. You can set the frequency to as often as you want, even up to multiple times a day. The more frequent the better, and it’s best to use a rolling save system so you have multiple backups available in case you need to isolate the exact time a problem occurred.
In addition, your backups should be both on-site and off-site so that even in the worst attacks, you can still recover fully. Apart from attacks, natural disasters or malfunctions at web-host data centers have been known to result in permanent loss of data, so keeping copies of your website backups near can also come in handy.
Ultimately, it’s important that you treat your website as you would your office, because that’s exactly what it is: your virtual office on the internet. Keeping it secure is a must as you interact with customers, make sales and grow your business
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