Securing Your Website
Securing Your Website
Securing your website is a vital part in making sure your site is functioning properly and your user data is protected.
The Importance of Securing your Website
First, let’s start off with why securing your website is so essential and a couple of the ways your site could be accessed by someone with malicious intent. All websites are prone to get attacked by cyber criminals when it comes down to it, this is because most cyber criminals don’t have a specific website in mind when they launch an attack. They use programs that scrape the Internet for websites that have any vulnerabilities. Our main goal when it comes to internet security is to help detect and prevent these attacks while cutting down on your websites vulnerabilities.
Most website owners do not know that they have any vulnerabilities on their website, meaning they could be attacked at any time. With the cyber threats becoming more and more sophisticated, it’s critical that securing your website is a top priority during website design, development, and long-term care.
This is one of the many reasons we here at MMCO focus heavily on website security. It’s become not just a standard practice but an absolute necessity to focus on website security during the entire build process of website design. Making sure your WordPress site more secure can be accomplished through the right combination of maintenance efforts, customizations, and plugins. Moreover, let’s move into what can happen when you fail to properly secure your website.
What happens when you don’t secure your website?
Now, when looking at how being hacked can affect your business, there are a couple of big-ticket items. The main reason securing your website is important is to protect your business, brand, and reputation on the web. If your website is constantly attacked and your customer’s information is being stolen, fewer people are going to come to your website and you run the risk of being sued. In extreme cases a consistently hacked website could land on Google’s blacklist of websites so that no matter how much you try, through SEO, you’ll never make it to a top priority spot in Google’s search algorithm. This often leads to your business losing essential customers and possibly thousands of dollars.
Tips to make securing your website easier
Starting with the basics of securing your website, you first need an SSL certificate that will help secure the data that gets collected by your website as that data is transferred to a server. Though it’s an extremely basic security measure it can help with popular search engines and browsers as they currently label all websites that don’t have an SSL certificate as insecure.
Theme and plugin updates are another key part of maintaining your website security as most updates include security patches that address unchecked vulnerabilities. Making sure all your plugins are updated regularly with whatever CMS (Content Management System) you use, like our favorite here at Missoula Media Company, WordPress can help ensure that your website isn’t compromised from a missed security patch.
Key Website Security Checklist
While there are a lot of security features that can benefit your site, here are some of the website security features that you should prioritize:
- Frequent Updates – As mentioned previously, an outdated site means hackers know how to break your website. Keep things up to date to stay ahead of the curve as much as possible.
- Brute Strength Protection – A brute strength attack focuses on attempting to log in repeatedly until a working password is discovered. To avoid this, block users who fail to log in repeatedly.
- Web Application Firewall – Implement a firewall that can protect against discovered vulnerabilities and common hacking efforts
- Multi-Factor Authentication – Force users to validate their machine using their email or phone number
- Realtime IP Blacklist – Block all IP addresses across the globe that are flagged as malicious.
We can help with securing your website!
Hopefully, this article has helped you understand why website security is important and gave you a few tips to help secure your website and business from cyber criminals. Securing your website is an important part of developing a website. At Missoula Media Company, we want to see your business thrive on the web, that’s why website security is crucial to us. If you need any help with building a secure website or want to further secure your current website we would love to hear from you! Give us a call or shoot us an email down below.
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