5 Tips To Keep Your Website Safe: Top Measures

There are several ways to protect your website, but these 5 tips to keep your website safe are a must-know. 

Today, a surprisingly large number of websites are compromised daily by bad guys. Therefore, seeking the best website security tips is a solid move. 

You might be frightened by the complex concepts and convoluted solutions to website vulnerabilities if you aren’t a tech guy or have little tech knowledge. Being a site owner you can hire a person who is officially certified in cyber security through some Cyber security online course offered by some reputed institutes.

But, amazingly, most of the best practices to follow to enhance your website’s security are so simple. 

Here are the essential tips to follow to safeguard your website. 

5 Tips to Keep Your Website Safe 

These tips will help improve your website’s security and ensure it effectively engages customers and boosts brand awareness. 

1. Keep Your Software Up-to-Date

Regardless of the platform that hosts your site, it’s crucial to keep it up-to-date. Regularly check for your plugins, the server’s operating system, and other software updates. If you can’t do this by yourself, then it’s recommended that you automate the process. 

Hackers scan thousands of websites, looking for vulnerabilities in their software. These updates will fix the security holes, protecting your site from attacks.

2. Use Secure and Uncrackable Passwords 

It’s essential to use uncrackable passwords. Hackers use sophisticated programs that are so good at cracking passwords. 

Don’t use a simple and easy-to-guess password; it’ll make your website vulnerable to attacks. Instead, use complex passwords that include lowercase letters, uppercase letters, special characters, and numerals.

3. Get an SSL Certificate

The SSL certificate is an initial for the Secure Sockets Layer certificate. This tool ensures personal information such as debit and credit card payments and data transfers on your website is secure. The SSL certificate is more important in e-commerce websites. 

For instance, when customers buy a product or service from your website, you’ll want to keep their information (addresses, phone numbers) secure. 

In addition, the SSL certificate will make your site appear more trustworthy to online shoppers. That’s because Google displays a badge showing that your site has an active encrypted SSL protocol. It appears as a green icon at the corner of your URL browser.

4. Use a Reputable Host  

There are many site hosts in the market, some affordable, some expensive. But the price hugely depends on a host’s services and features. 

It’s best to choose a reputable and secure website hosting company. Ensure the host is advanced, knows all the threats, and is devoted to securing your site. 

The host should also be able to back up your site’s data on a remote server. Not only this, the data should be easy to access and restore in case your website gets compromised. Lastly, pick a website host that readily offers technical support when needed. 

5. Use VPN

It’s essential to use VPNs when you access your website from public wireless networks. They are highly vulnerable because you can’t control who connects to them. Many hackers use public Wi-Fi to access the private information of other users. 

But you can secure your site using a VPN while on a public Wi-Fi network. It makes it almost impossible for hackers to decipher encrypted data. 

The Popular Methods That Hackers Use to Compromise Websites 

Hacking is multifaceted, but cybercriminals use different methods to break into a site. These methods include but aren’t limited to brute force attacks, software exploitation, etc. 

You can apply the above protection tips to your website by understanding how these methods work. 

1. Brute Force Attacks

Here hackers use a variety of passwords on your site with the hopes that one will let them in your website. The most popular tool hackers use to decipher passwords is the rainbow table. It’s a massive file that contains a list of all passwords and associated hashes. 

The best protection against brute force attacks is using a strong password. Ensure your password combines lowercase and uppercase letters and characters.

2. Social Engineering 

This method – social engineering – is also known as human hacking. It’s a simple and popular method that hackers use to access websites. The hacker persuades someone to do something that will expose them. 

For example, the hacker can pose as a software engineer and persuade someone to give them access to the website.

3. Denial of DDOS and Services  

The denial of DDOS and service is a method of flooding a site with a lot of fake traffic, which crashes the web server. Hackers usually use this method as a threat or a way to extort money. 

In recent years this method of attack has become so sophisticated. But there are some defenses to protect your website from it. For example, you can filter and route your traffic using hardware or software. 

4. ClickJacking 

There are sites with hidden and harmful links. Most of them are usually embedded video links. You’ll be redirected to a nefarious weblink when you click to play a particular video. 

If you’ve enabled automatic downloading, your PC might download this malware. The malware work in different ways; it can read all your keyboard inputs giving the hacker important information. 

5. Phishing 

This is a common method and a subset of social engineering. It happens when the hacker sends you an email that looks like it’s from a trusted/ legitimate source, yet it’s not. 

Sadly, many people have fallen into this trap and lost their websites and sensitive information. 

Conclusion 

This article has listed the 5 tips to keep your website safe; they are practical and are just a pick from the many tips. 

Note that your desire to keep your website safe is valid. Many hackers aren’t always interested in your data or defaming you with malicious messages on your homepage; it can be much worse. 

Some hackers can use your website to host illegal files or use it to send spam emails. This is something that will ruin the credibility of your website and lead to severe ramifications, such as loss of revenue and customers.