If you’re asking yourself “how can I secure my website”, the answer is that you need to make the right choices at the point of implementation. You then need to commit to ongoing care and maintenance - and be prepared to make changes where necessary.
How To Secure a Website: Simple Guide To Website Security
Your website starts with a host and a content management system. You can get these individually or use a company that offers an all-in-one solution.
The main advantage of choosing your host and CMS individually is that the stand-alone CMSs (e.g. WordPress) offer a high degree of customizability. The main disadvantage of choosing your host and CMS individually is that the security of the stand-alone CMSs tends to depend largely, if not entirely, on the skill of the user. The opposite is true of the all-in-one solutions (assuming you use a reputable provider). They have much more limited customizability, but the provider generally manages most, if not all, of the security.
This means that you need to think carefully about how much the customizability of the stand-alone CMS systems really means to you and, bluntly, how much resource you’re prepared to dedicate to keeping your website secure. If all you want is a basic website which you can run with minimal hassle and on a fairly tight budget then an all-in-one solution may be by far your best option.
Designing your website with security in mind
“How can I secure my website?” is a question you should ask at every stage of the build process. Possibly the single, most important step towards keeping your website secure is to identify the most important processes and build them first. Then test them and identify any weaknesses with the business model. Once you’re happy with the business process then go through it in detail and try to identify any and every way it could potentially introduce a vulnerability into your website.
For example, if you were selling physical products online, then it’s obvious that the need to take payment could create all sorts of security issues. There are, however, plenty of ways to work around this, such as using a payment gateway. What may be less obvious, however, is that the form you use to capture the shipping address (which you absolutely need) could be used to inject malicious code into your website. You, therefore, need robust validation on the content.
By working on a website in order of business priority, you give yourself the longest, possible time to test and improve the key functions. If necessary, you can launch without the website being completely ready as long as you are happy with your top-priority processes. If time is really tight, you can often speed up the design without compromising security by implementing the Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework. This separates the design element from the security element and allows two teams to work on the same function without getting in each other’s way.
Make sure you cover your security basics thoroughly
Although hackers and malware creators are both becoming ever more ingenious, a lot of attacks on websites simply take advantage of basic security flaws. This is particularly true when it comes to attacks on SMBs.
While no company is too small to be a target, the fact is that people with the skills to undertake sophisticated cyber-attacks are probably going to want to put them to use in situations where they stand to make a lot of money out of them. In other words, they’ll target corporates and government organizations rather than SMBs. With that in mind, here are some tips which cost little to nothing to follow and which can go a long way to keeping your website safe.
Implement two-factor authentication
If you asked a cybersecurity professional “how can I secure my website”, then this would probably be one of their first suggestions. For completeness, you should still use a strong and unique password for your website and anything connected with it (e.g. your host access and your FTP/sFTP access).
Enforce robust access controls
Only give administrative access to people who really need it. This is determined by the work they do, not by the frequency with which they access the website. For example, content creators may need to access your website several times a day, but they rarely need administrative privileges
Limit the amount of software you use and keep it up-to-date
This applies to all websites, but WordPress websites stand out. Not only is it vital to keep WordPress itself up-to-date, but you should be very careful what plugins you use. You should also ensure that any plugins you do use are kept updated by their developer and that you apply these updates promptly.
Use https when extra security is needed
It wouldn’t necessarily hurt to use https for all pages but certainly, use it for ones that have particular security considerations.
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