5 Simple Tips for Better Website Security
Don’t give your website away. Make it safe and secure so that it makes it difficult for hackers to get anything from your site. With a safe and secure website, your SEO efforts such as link building and guest blogging could be as easy as possible. Services like outreachmonks.com recommend five simple measures that every company can carry out without spending a lot of time or money.
5 Simple Tips for Better Website Security
1. Make sure that it is up to date
The Internet community is continuously developing open source solutions and generally recognizes bugs and security gaps quickly and fixes them even faster. However, you only benefit from the fixed reaction of the community and the development team if you keep your system up to date. With many CMS solutions, updates can be automated using plug-ins. With the ” Easy-Update Manager ” for WordPress you keep the popular system up to date and thus actively contribute to website security. Since plug-ins and other add-ons are independent programs, you have to check them separately to ensure that they are up to date.
But even if you have put together your website without the help of a CMS, you should pay attention to the latest versions. PHP or MySQL, for example, should always be up to date so that attackers do not have open doors.
2. Regular back-ups
If hackers have gained access despite security precautions, they can cause considerable damage. Not only does data espionage and abuse occur frequently, but hackers also overwrite or delete entire databases in order to cover their tracks. All important content should therefore be backed up regularly. This is a precautionary measure in two ways: even with a standard update, individually adapted system files may be overwritten. A regular backup of all data is, therefore, a must for every company.
There are also tools for this precaution: There are various plug-ins for WordPress and other CMS can also be equipped with appropriate extensions to facilitate a backup of the entire website. If, on the other hand, you work without a CMS, you can manually save the server content externally or you can use a tool such as rsync.
3. Secure login data
Secure access data should be a matter of course. But in everyday life, it looks different, because the most popular password remains the number sequence “123456”. In addition, many users adopt user names suggested by the system, such as “Admin” or “Administrator” – in combination with weak passwords, an easy target for hackers. The following applies to user names and passwords: no real names or simple, easily understandable combinations. A secure password requires a random string of characters and must be long enough.
4. Stay informed
Anyone who wants to protect their website from hackers and other criminal cyber-attacks should inform themselves regularly about current dangers and security gaps. The first point of contact is of course the respective community. Most forums have tons of website security threads. There, possible security risks are usually recognized first, discussed, and ideally rectified immediately. To find out about system-independent risks, it is worth taking a look at the website of the Federal Office for Information Security, for example.
5. HTTPS and SSL certificate
HTTPS secures the exchange of sensitive data. With the help of SSL (Secure Socket Layer), the data exchange between server and client is encrypted. Hackers cannot easily read or intercept the transmitted data. The certificate can be purchased on several websites. With many hosting providers, the certificate is included in the web hosting package or offered for an additional fee. Another plus: The visitor recognizes the website security certificate by the “lock symbol” in the browser and the HTTPS transport protocol – this creates trust with potential customers.