Speed up website security in four clever ways

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Speed up website security in four clever ways

If you’re a website owner, don’t overthink your website security. Start with the basics. Here are top five things you absolutely must do to protect your website, your personal information, and your customers from a data breach and other forms of cybertheft.

Use a Password Manager to Keep Logins Secure.

How do you keep your passwords safe? Are you depending on your web browser’s easy-to-use autofill function and/or reusing the same passwords over and over again? You wouldn’t be alone in this common but catastrophic mistake.

In January 2018, Wired reported findings from Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy that auto-filling your login and password information leaves you susceptible to data tracking and collecting from third-party sites. If you reuse passwords for multiple logins, the script from these predatory third-party websites can lift your password and use them to access your profiles.

The quick solution isn’t to mix up all of your passwords and to write them down in a notebook somewhere. Password managers, like LastPass and 1Password, can generate a random password for each of your profiles and websites, store them for you, and keep them encrypted. Some of them also have two-step authentication, giving you an extra layer of security.

Another important note: limit the number of people who have access to your website and restrict administrative privileges to everyone except for a select few. The more people are able to access your site’s back door, the greater the chances are of a data breach. Even the most trustworthy employee can forget to log out, can reuse passwords, or do something to accidentally jeopardize your site’s security.

Install an SSL Certificate.

An SSL Certificate puts a Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) between your website and its visitors’ computers. Particularly for a business website, it is a critically important security measure to install.

This communication technology simultaneously encrypts and authenticates the data that’s being sent to and from your site and your visitors, keeping it completely confidential. As a result, outsiders aren’t able to track or steal your visitors’ information during the exchange. It also has the benefit of protecting the integrity of the data as it’s being received or sent from your site.

If your business website accepts customer’s credit card numbers and personal information, an SSL certificate can prevent cyber thieves from stealing it and ruining your business’ reputation.

An SSL certificate is more important than ever now that Google will flag any site without one as “not secure”. For iPage customers, we are offering a free basis SSL to prevent this from happening. Find out more about how the Google changes might affect your website, or how to enable free SSL if you have live website with a domain purchased through iPage.

Backup Your Data Regularly.

Your web hosting company most likely backs up your site’s data on a regular schedule. For a business website, that may not be enough.

If your site goes down, gets hacked, or sees other major damage, then your backed up data will help you get it up again quickly. To maintain the utmost security on your website, get additional help from a backup application or a dedicated backup plugin. Though they may cost a little extra, they will store your website’s data and any related information. Try to install a plugin that performs backups at least once a week.

Perform Updates on Schedule.

It’s happened to literally millions of website owners. You get an email notification about a software update or, if you’re running a WordPress-hosted site, a theme and plugin update. Instead of heeding the notification, you assume your web hosting company will perform this routine update and delete the email. A few months later, your site gets hacked. Your personal data, your customers’ data—it’s all been stolen by cyber thieves.

Though incredibly common, this kind of data breach is also entirely preventable. According to the world-renowned web security specialists at Sucuri Remediation Group, almost two-thirds of WordPress-hosted sites run on outdated themes, plugins, and software because website owners neglect their updates.

Delayed updates don’t just make your website glitchy. They leave gaping holes in its security through which hackers can enter. Stay on top of your updates, and your site will be impenetrable.

Read more Great tips to accelerate website speed

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Please contact us for seo service packages at TDHSEO.COM.

TDHSEO Team

Email: tdhseo@gmail.com
Skype: tdhseo
https://www.facebook.com/tdhseo

Thank you!


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Ways to protect your website

You need to protect your site, valuable data, and online assets from hackers and other tech-savvy thieves. This guide will show you how to protect your website, data, and business from ransomware attacks and other security breaches.

1. Employ Best Practices for Your System Updates, Logins, and Email

Robust website and business security starts with implementing best practices and sound preventative measures, system-wide, to keep attackers and other bad actors out. This means securing what you control. You need to:

a) Automate Your Operating System Updates

Today’s hackers know that many SMBs and individuals overlook updating their computer systems’ operating software. Many count on this to launch their attacks, as seen in the 2017 WannaCry ransomware outbreak stated above, which exploited a known Windows operating systems issue.

All users who had updated their Windows OS before the attack were secure. Unfortunately, such attacks can bring down entire websites, networks, businesses, governmental systems, and other institutional systems. The fix involves setting up automatic updates that will install the latest security patches and updates.

b) Update Your Website Platform and Software

You also need to update your content management system, apps, scripts, and plugins. The code of many of these tools is easily accessible to both malicious hackers and well-intentioned developers since they are created as open-source software programs. For instance, if your website runs on a WordPress platform, your base installation and any third-party plugins you have installed are potentially vulnerable unless you regularly update to the newest versions.

c) Use Strong Passwords

Creating strong passwords can protect your website by preventing access to hackers. Secure passwords are long and have a mix of special characters, letters, and numbers. Always refrain from using easy-to-guess keywords or personal information, and never use the same password across multiple online platforms. Also, ensure that everyone with access to your website use similarly strong passwords.

d) Use Multiple-Factor Authentication

You can also decide to use multiple-factor authentication where your admins, contributors, and employees with access to your website’s backend must enter a valid user ID, password, and a unique authenticator number.

e) Secure Your Email Systems and Procedures

Infected email attachments cause a large number of hacks, data breaches, and network attacks. Despite email security protocols such as spam guards and virus scans, hackers are still creating new ingenious ways to gain access to your email and infect your computer systems. You need to implement best practices that include employee scrutiny and education, as well as automated scans.

2. Use Parameterized Queries

SQL injections are a common website hack. Your website is susceptible if your web form or URL parameter allows outside users to supply information. Leaving these parameters fields too open can give someone access to your database by inserting code into them.

You must protect your website from this vulnerability because your database holds a lot of sensitive customer data. To protect yourself from SQL injection attacks, you need to implement the use of parameterized queries to ensure that your code is secure enough to prevent hackers from messing with it.

3. Use Content Security Policy (CSP)

Cross-site Scripting (XSS) attacks are another common threat you need to consider. These attacks occur when a hacker slips malicious JavaScript code onto your website pages, which can infect the pages of all your website visitors who are exposed to the code. Similarly to SQL injection attacks, using parametrized queries can ensure that any code you use for fields or functions that allow input to remain as explicit as possible to leave no room for hackers to slip in anything.

Content Security Policy (CSP) is another tool that can help protect your website from XSS attacks. It allows your site admin to specify the domains that browsers should consider valid executable scripts’ sources when on your page. Therefore, the browser pays no attention to malware or malicious script that may infect your visitor’s computer. Using CSP requires you to craft and add proper HTTP headers to your webpage that provide a string of directives that tell browsers which domains are okay and any exceptions to consider.

4. Protect Your Website, Systems, and Data from Malware

Business websites and online stores are susceptible to malware attacks. Ergo, you need to add malware protection to your site with automated alerts and updates. Remember that, unlike top online platforms such as Shopify or BigCommerce that use top-notch security against data breaches and malware, many hosting services do not protect you from malware. Thus, you need to add malware prevention security to prevent attacks, infections, defacements, SEO spam, and hacker ransoms.

5. Use an SSL Connection Site-wide

A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate ensures the security of the online connection between your website and your users. SSL provides that all information that passes between browsers and servers is encrypted and transmitted securely. This prevents eavesdroppers and hackers from intercepting and accessing data in transit between users’ browsers and web servers.

6. Set Up Site Backups

Website backups are critical to the protection of your data from hackers, administrator errors, and loss. You need to contact your e-commerce platform or hosting provider to inquire if they provide automatic backup services. If not, you need to ensure that you either own backups or find a third-party service.

Read more: How to protect website from Google Fred Algorithm

_______________________________________________________________________________

Please contact us for seo service packages at TDHSEO.COM.

TDHSEO Team

Email: tdhseo@gmail.com
Skype: tdhseo
https://www.facebook.com/tdhseo

Thank you!