So, you just set up your first web site … congratulations! Now that you have a web presence though, you need to think about how to defend it.
You wouldn’t walk away from your brick and mortar shop without locking the door and arming the alarm system, right? Then why is your web security less effective than a broken screen door?
This article will help you learn how to fortify your site against the bad guys of cyberspace, so be sure to take copious notes from what you learn in the paragraphs below.
1) Install Sitelock on your website’s back end
While it is great to be aware of all the security issues that may give an attacker access to your website, it can be an exhausting affair at times.
In order to spend more time building your business rather than running it, we recommend installing a back end security application such as Sitelock.
From looking at all the Sitelock Reviews written by past users, you can see that handing the lion’s share of work to a web security application is far more productive than worrying about these issues 24/7.
2) Update your software and plugins regularly
If you are a WordPress user, it can be annoying to have to constantly update software and plugins when new versions become available.
However, performing this task is vitally important, as it helps patch security vulnerabilities that researchers have discovered during routine audits of their code.
Failing to update these programs is what many hackers count on, as they exploit the laziness of most webmasters by making use of exploits that have long since been uncovered.
Thwart them by making time once per week to clear your updates page of programs and plugins that are waiting to be updated.
3) Disable the use of HTML in input fields
You might not think that something as innocuous as a ‘Contact Me’ web form would be the single point of failure that might lead to a takeover of your domain, but you would be wrong.
Hackers take advantage of the fact that many of these forms are put into place with the use of HTML and JavaScript enabled to send code that can command the target server to carry out its wishes.
By disabling HTML in contact fields, any that is sent will be stripped of its brackets, rendering them worthless.
4) Use strong username/password combos
This is another part of web security that elicits a ‘duh’ from many so-called advocates of ‘common sense’, but it is shocking how many webmasters keep the default username in place, while using passwords such as ‘password’ or ‘myname1234’.
Change the username to something that is far from obvious, ideally with a mix of letters, numbers and characters.
Similarly, your password should be equally beguiling, making it insanely hard for a hacker with a brute force script from busting the doors off your website in record time.
5) Install a SSL certificate on your site
Do you care about the security of your clients? If so, why are you still using HTTP instead of HTTPS?
By taking the extra step to install a SSL certificate, you will be encrypting information such as login info and credit card details with 128-bit encryption, rendering this stream impossible to crack to all but the most elite of hackers (and even they go for the easier targets 99% of the time).
