5 Website Security Best Practices For Businesses

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Whether it’s for your business or a hobby portfolio, Your website is the component that represents your online presence. It is likely to be the point of contact between the brand and its target audience. A well-built site must attract and convert customers in every industry. However, a good business site naturally becomes a target for hackers who would want to deface it or place spammy links on it.

In fact, a study by Cybintsolutions stated that 43% of cyber attacks target small business and 64% of the web-based businesses have experienced attacks. A site contains sensitive consumer information, business data, monetary transactions; therefore, even one of these occurrences could be disastrous for your business brand.

If your website does not contain any valuable data, then hackers can use it to mine crypto-currencies, or for the botnet, or use your server for spam. That being said, you’ll inevitably be faced with complex problems when venturing into the realm of website security. In this article, we’ll outline six best practices for securing and maintaining a business website to minimize the risk.

5 Top Website Security Best Practices

Here are the 5 best website security practices that you can implement to safeguard your website in 2020.

1. Use a highly Reliable and Secure Hosting Platform

Security is a significant concern when looking at a web hosting plan. A reliable host is dedicated to maintaining the security of your website. Hackers are more likely to take advantage of websites running on hosting platforms that don’t have strong security. The most secure hosting plans shall include features like Firewalls, DDos and Virus Protection, Spam Filter, SSL Certificate, Remote Backup, Network Monitoring, and Domain Name Privacy.

Make your business website more secure by partnering with a secure hosting company. The security protocols of the hosting company will serve as your first line of defense against cyberattacks. For example, hosting plans at RedSwitches are built on a network that’s secured by over 1,000 GBps of DDoS protection and offer a dedicated team of experts who will help you in the event of a security breach.

2. Get an SSL Security Certificate

The green icon in the corner of a website URL field in the browser is a badge that proves for the site to have activated encrypted SSL protocol. This security protocol protects users’ information between the website and the database. This encryption makes it difficult for unauthorized users to access your site or its traffic. Websites with an SSL certificate additionally get an SEO boost since search engines like Google prefer to rank more secure websites higher.

It will also help you avoid Google’s warning about unsafe websites, which can have a negative impact on your brand. An SSL certificate adds a green padlock to the user’s browser address bar. It encrypts the data that’s transmitted to your site to protect sensitive information such as login credentials and credit card information from your customers.

This will only make your site visitors appreciate the extra effort you take to keep their data secure and are likely to be encouraged to engage with your business rather than a competitor lacking the extra layer of security.

3. Implement Automatic Backups

Owning every latest backup of your website is highly important in case the worst happens. In the event of a ransomware attack or failure in a software update, you could be losing your data forever. Back up is essential to be able to get your website up and running as quickly as possible to avoid business fallback.

This is why it is necessary for every business website to implement an automatic backup system. A reliable hosting platform often offers and manages this service. Start by activating the Backup feature from your hosting provider to have your site backed up either daily, weekly, or once a month. The Backup feature allows you to restore your website instantly with a single click instantly.

4. Be cautious of login access

One of the most important ways to improve your website security and reduce its risks is by having tighter login access and strong control over website authorization. If you have weak login controls, then any unauthorized user can get access to all the valuable information. A login shouldn’t be valid for 30 days despite its inactivity.

Longer-term accessibility could be of risk to your business and its customer data because all it takes is for a  logged-in device to fall in the wrong hands. We recommend you set your logins expiry after no more than a few hours or days of inactivity. It may be bothersome for the visitors to log in multiple times, but it is better to secure it than to have the wrong person get logged in.

We would also advise you to set a firm limit on the number of login attempts. This way, your website will be protected against brute force attacks.

5. Schedule frequent website security scans to check for any vulnerabilities

Protecting your website against hackers is simple if you make use of the right tools and paying attention to the website’s performance. Monitoring your site regularly is highly effective against DDoS attacks. Testing and monitoring of websites have a significant benefit in the long term. Professional security scanning software is often offered as a service by hosting providers.

There are also many free tools available to measure how secure your website is. Although the software tools are more expensive, it could be highly beneficial to provide a more in-depth look into the security layers of your website. It is also important to make sure you monitor your website’s up-time and examine its performance because a slow-loading website or a website that goes down frequently could also be an indicator of a hacked website.

Conclusion

In summary, you need to plan around three things while building a website security blueprint to lower risk and prevent unauthorized access, along with ensuring the best possible user experience to the visitors:

  1. Finding the most reliable hosting provider.
  2. Finding and fixing additional vulnerabilities on the site.
  3. Maintaining and Monitoring data and software.

Maintaining your website and keeping it secure is a team effort. You shall immediately start by implementing the tips stated above in this article to guarantee the best security and maintenance practices for your site.

If you have any inquiries about the website and hosting security practices, our experts would love to help. Drop your questions in the comment box or Contact Us if your business needs a reliable and secure hosting plan that suits your needs the best.