Online status can provide valuable visibility for your business, but creating a secure website can increase consumer confidence in shopping with your business. Setting up a company website can increase brand awareness and interact with customers more conveniently, but security must be prioritized when building a website. Otherwise, the website may exclude customers.
Ready to learn how to make a website secure?
Read on as we cover the nine steps to creating a secure website for your business.
Choose a capable host
When you launch a website, you will end up with multiple options for a hosting provider. However, each one will have its own advantages that can improve your website. How much security you end up with is based on the functions they have like DDoS (denial of service) or WAF (web application firewall) protections.
Established web hosts such as Bluehost and GoDaddy allow you to determine the security level, which is the first step in ensuring website security.
WAF is an incredibly important component because it avoids attempts to disrupt your website. Structured query language (SQL) injection and cross-site scripting are two ways your information is vulnerable to attacks, but WAF monitors these severe problems.
Websites with data loss or beyond authorization may attract potential customers, but working with an effective hosting provider can keep your website online and safe, crucial if you are an e-commerce store or a user with a user account necessary.
Choose the right content management system
The content management system (CMS) is a useful tool for building your website and managing future content. The most beneficial tool is continuously improving its protection level, monitoring the program code, and maintaining a fast process.
When creating a secure website, you need a powerful CMS.
With the emergence of vulnerabilities, a great CMS platform is going to protect your site and check for every security breach. These systems run in cycles through updates to enhance their software, and the latest version can help your site resist the latest weaknesses and hacking methods.
Many popular CMS platforms (such as Joomla and WordPress) are user-friendly and promote security, which makes installation modifications very convenient not only for your development team but also for your marketers.
Manage add-ons and plugins
Although plugins and add-ons can provide a better experience for visitors, too much traffic may put your website at risk. They can also slow down your website and hinder responsiveness. Regular add-on and plugin inspections can reduce the possibility of minor defects.
Whether these additions come from your CMS or a third party, you must check the reputation, details, and revision history of plugins and add-ons.
Just like CMS, these website accessories also require maintenance and regular maintenance. Their defense mechanism against errors is as good as their development. If they become obsolete, they can expose your business to security risks.
You can also take advantage of security-specific attachments that restrict viruses. WordPress plugins such as Wordfence Security or Sucuri Security can reduce penetration and help you learn how to build a secure website.
Enable different access levels
Different people can contribute their expertise to your website in your business, but different layers of control can help you monitor their actions and protect your website. Restricting access to specific areas of operations of the website can prevent errors and crashes.
Separate employee login is a valuable way to manage adjustments and release content that can avoid errors.
Business owners and upper-level people can have the most significant privileges, making them responsible for website changes. This method can preserve your company’s online business and avoid catastrophic setbacks.
Implement a reliable password
Insufficient passwords often lead to online data leaks, which may seriously hinder business development. When you have many people working together on your website, it’s essential to set a password convention.
Network security experts suggest that users should use multiple passwords on the platform. To distinguish your company’s website password, you can use the original password with various symbols, letters, and numbers.
Another screening feature is 2FA or Two-factor authentication, which can stop hackers. The other element, like added codes, allows for increased approval for identified users, and there are multiple CMS platforms that include this in the platform as part of the security measures.
Set up an automatic backup
It takes time and effort to invest in your website, but the server may fail, ruining your hard work. The backup system is an excellent solution that would be able to restore website data and speed start-up times.
When you need to find the root problem that caused a crash, you can protect your business from the redundant work of time-intensive recovery and backup systems.
Store data in a trusted location such as a central server to protect your content from potential threats. Automatic backup of website content and layout allows you to start from scratch.
For best results, install automatic backup technology to collect data regularly.
Stay safe and subscribe to updates
Periodic security applications from the host or CMS are usually renewed via subscription. A paid subscription requires you to pay it on time. If you don’t do this, no one will review your platform when these subscriptions end.
Malware can take advantage of this, which means that keeping these elements up to date is vital.
Tracking various services can give you an idea of which subscriptions are about to run out and how well they integrate with your website. Setting alerts or enabling automatic updates for these features can turn off subscription interruptions.
Contains secure socket layer certificate
Secure transactions are a vital function of an enterprise, and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates are a way to protect online purchases.
When you request information from a customer or website visitor, you can verify the host’s SSL exchange. Cybercriminals can collect unencrypted information or plain text, but SSL allows you to encrypt sensitive data, such as credit and debit card numbers.
Together with SSL, commercial websites can exchange HTTP addresses for HTTPS. This address improves your website’s security and serves as a signal of trust for customers and business partners, which is essential.
Reserve test time
In building a website and security measures, you may take a lot of responsibilities, but still do not realize the lingering instability. Going through your website systematically to test each part can reveal the parts that need work.
You can browse the pages and processes that visitors will see. If there is an error message, redirect to an HTTP address instead of HTTPS, or a suspicious failure occurs, you can handle it immediately.
Specifying the test interval can capture some areas and allow you to patch your website. Although you may be eager to start the site, the final security improvement can provide you with a reliable platform.
