How to Secure Your Website | An Ultimate Guide

Did you know that more than 50,000 websites get hacked each and every year?

Aren’t you concerned yet after hearing the stat?

You should be, believe it or not, indeed, we are living in such kind of insecurity all the time and it’s very true to be trusted in that way. Now, turn to today’s subject, and if you are a website owner, here is a pretty basic question for you.

Do you know how to secure your website?

If you don’t know the exact answer precisely, don’t worry! Just go through the whole article, hopefully, you wouldn’t be disappointed after reading the article.

Ok, I am starting this writing by stating a real story that was happened to me lately. So, let’s get started…!

It was about three or four months back story; my website got hacked due to my unawareness regarding the security issues. It wasn’t fully hacked but definitely was a partial hack. Initially, I couldn’t realize as I didn’t know much about these issues before the shit happened to me.

The reason of my unawareness was, I didn’t bother much about security issues actually…!

Fortunately, I recovered my site from being spoilt by the help of an expert, but this might not happen in that way. I might have lost my website forever, and it’s happening all through the internet. After facing such difficulty, I came to realize and then started my study about security issues. During my research and study, I have come across all sorts of things along the way that should maintain for securing any kind of website. That’s why I felt responsible by my side and trying to write something valuable for others so that they might get a proper value and protect their sites from being spoilt.

In this actionable guideline, you will learn how to avoid the common pitfalls and strengthen the security of your website. A number of actionable steps can keep your site secure and protect all kinds of online security mischiefs.

Importance of Security for Your Website

Before these days, there was a time when most website owners didn’t need to be worried about the security of their websites except they dealt with eCommerce, medical, and banking sites. Because eCommerce, medical, and banking sites deal with lots of sensitive data.

But now, the time has changed enormously and to keep pace with the time every aspect of human existence has been modified according to the demand of time. Now Google also formally recommends securing websites with HTTPS and provides high emphasis on taking other relevant steps to protect websites from being spoilt.

Moreover, securing your website means prevents Malware(viruses) from being uploaded and affected your site. Ensuring security also prevents Phishing emails from being sent through your website. A secure website reassures your visitors that your website is safe and junk-free by building the trust level. Ultimate security helps to get a better ranking in the SERP like Google and other search engines. Most importantly, a secure website protects your business from getting hacked from hackers and protects all the valuable data of your website.

Now the question arises…

How can you make website secure?

The answer is pretty straight forward and you can get it by taking a look at the rest of the article. So, here, let’s go for it….!

How to Secure Your Website?

As the necessity of a secure website discussed in the above, we need to know how to make this happen and get things done. To make things easy and comfortable for securing your site, I have come up with some hand-picked and most vital steps that every website owner should take.

So, before starting in details, I am shortlisting all the steps and tactics right now.

1. Use a Secure Hosting Provider
2. Update, Update, and Update!
3. Install a Quality Security Plugin
4. Use HTTPS
5. Make Your Passwords Secure
6. Reliable User Permission
7. Change Default Settings!
8. Backup Your Site
9. Hire a Security Expert
10. Monitor Webmaster for Vulnerabilities

These are some vital aspects that you should take into consideration having a secure website. Now, let’s dig into the down one by one.

? Use a secure hosting provider

Secured hosting provider is a dream for every website owner. This is the first and foremost steps of a site holder. There are tons of web hosting providers that are enough to make you confused in choosing the right hosting provider. This is the most essential element of your website.

Before choosing a solid hosting provider, research on the hosting providers out there in the market. In this case, you can read the reviews and see the ratings of respective hosting providers. Make sure that the hosting provider is aware of possible threats and devoted to keeping secure your website from these threats.

Your host should also back up your data to a secure remote server and make it easy to restore in case of necessity. Most importantly, choose a host that offers dedicated 24/7 technical support promptly when you are in need.

In this case, I can mention some of the renowned web hostings providers. For instance, you can use BlueHost, as a beginner or starter. SiteGround could be fine for more advanced needs, Kinsta could be a great option for a secured web hosting provider. For the best-managed cloud hosting, Cloudways could suite well. There are several others like Hostinger, Namecheap, and so on are available out there in the market.

? Update, update, and update!

This is something that we aren’t careful enough; most of the time we forget to update themes, plugins, and so on. Keep your whole WordPress up to date with the latest version. Countless websites are compromising every single day due to using the outdated version of WordPress, themes, and plugins as well.

Even if you aren’t a WordPress user, always try to keep yourself up to date with the latest technology of the respective items. As per a sincere user, it’s badly needed to update your whole website ASAP, whether it could be any CMS, plugins, or any other software. Those updates might just contain security enhancements or for other vulnerability issues. So, without updating, you could lose valuable site forever.

Most of the website-attacks are automated by the bots as they are continuously scanning every site for searching for an opportunity. So it’s no longer a good practice of updating the website once a month or even once a week. Never use backdated themes and plugins on your website and most importantly, never use any nulled theme and plugin from any sources. Thre are lots of facebook groups or other sources out there on the internet which could be a prime supplier of nulled themes and plugins. Don’t be fool by being trapped in any way.

? Install a quality security plugin

After updating everything required for your website, next, you need to enhance the website security. The easiest way to make this happen is to use a quality security plugin for your website.

To protect from all kind of insecurities and vulnerabilities, it’s wise using a website firewall, that can be a cover all the security holes. Moreover, as a WordPress user, you can use a quality plugin like WordFence, Sucuri, and All In One WP Security & Firewall plugins.

? Use HTTPS

HTPPS stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure, which is used to secure your website. In July 2018, ss Google Chrome released a security update; you must want to have a green HTTPS on your browser bar and show your visitors when they visit your site. Most of the users know that these five letters as a crucial shorthand for hacker security. This will save your sensitive data on your particular webpage and create trust between you and your visitors.

After purchasing an SSL certificate and then installing it, then you should update your site to use HTTPS encryption. An SSL certificate is vital for securing transfer protocol by encrypting different sensitive data like credit cards, personal data, contact information, and your server itself. It confirms that your website is secure and most importantly, able to transfer encrypted information back and forth in between the server and the person’s browser. Moreover, the search engine also takes website security issues very seriously, and SSL helps by qualifying for HTTPS encryption.

? Make your passwords secure

As an admin level user, it’s not enough to make a unique password only, instead you need to come up with a more complicated and random password that can’t be replicated anywhere else. You can store all your necessary password somewhere outside the website directory.

If you have 15 digit jumble of letters and numbers as your password, it could be forgettable, that’s why you can store in any offline device or any other computer or hard-drive. Additionally, you may store them any cloud storage like google drive or dropbox, etc. So make sure that you have secure your passwords.

? Ensure reliable user permission

This is more technical than the previous issues and only applies to sites that have multiple users or logins. It’s very important that every user has the appropriate permission to access their respective files. Having a proper user-defined role and access eliminate the probability of any mistake can happen.

? Change default settings!

Sometimes everything default can be guessed or conjecturable, and that’s why you need to change the default settings to some extent. Though today’s CMS applications are very popular, at the same time, they can be very tricky as well in terms of security. By far, most of the attacks happen against automated websites, and many of these attacks occur on users when they possess only default settings.

For instance, if you are a WordPress user and you are still using wp-admin in the login URL when login to your website back-end, this would be easy for a hacker to break the initial security of your website as they already know the default URL settings of WordPress. Changing this setting could make a tough job for hackers to break the initial protection of your website. In this way, there are other issues, including WordPress and themes that you can take into consideration.

? Backup your site

Having an affected website that hacked by the hackers is not something you would like to undergo, but you probably don’t want to be caught off guard in case the shit happens to you. Taking a proper back up your whole website could be crucial when you are lost your website. To recover your lost website backup can fill up the gap but it shouldn’t be a proper replacement for the security solution, but you recover your damaged files.

In terms of taking backup your file, make sure that they are off sided and automated as well. You do a lot of things every day, and you might forget to have a manual backup, that’s why you take an automated back up could be rational thinking. Another important thing is checking the backup that you have chosen to make sure they are working accordingly. You can have multiple backups for redundancy. This will recover files from a point before the file being hacked.

? Hire a security expert

If you are not a tech-savvy one, it would tough for you to maintain the security of your website. In this case, you can hire a security expert for managing your website from being spoilt. This could be a lifesaver initiative when it comes to protecting your website, or you can build a relationship with a security service provider.

As a non-techy, you may enough for taking care of fundamental security issues, but many security measurements need to handled by the experts. Companies who are providing security services can continually scan your website for vulnerabilities, monitor for malicious activity, perform full website security audits, and be on hand whenever a renovation is needed.

? Monitor webmaster for vulnerabilities

Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) is used to analyze the technical aspects of a website. Basically, the tool deals with crawl stats, page errors, rich snippets, and so on. This is a strait-laced tool for monitoring the whole website performance and make webmasters aware of critical parameters of their websites.

If you make any changes on your website, web security scans should be performed on a scheduled basis. There are a number of free and paid tools out there on the Internet that can help you to measure your website’s security. Using the Google webmaster tool can take you to the next level. This tool lets you know about the way that Google recognizes your website. Moreover, you can see the traffic and ranking metrics of your website.

Final Suggestion

In this time of modern technology apart from lots of advantages, there are lots of vulnerabilities that may happen if you aren’t aware of various issues. Security is one such concerning issue that needs to take into consideration, and it becomes most apparent for making your website safe from being spoilt.

One of the researches states that 38% of businesses say they’re ready to handle cyber attacks. Another stat says 43% of cybercrimes happen against small businesses. This above-mentioned stat is pretty alarming as most of the businesses are small in type.

By maintaining the aspects mentioned above, you can protect your website from being hacked. These are the proven tactics that need to take into consideration to make your website sound and healthy while performing on the ocean of the internet.

In Conclusion

Security is the most vital issue for maintaining a smooth and uninterrupted secured website. If you haven’t taken any actions yet to secure your website, you’re certainly at risk even while you’re reading this article. Though it’s not possible to make a website 100% secure as hackers are always trying to attack your website and steal the sensitive data. But you can make things difficult for the hackers by taking the security measures that I just have outlined above.

I hope this article helped you to understand the necessity of security for your website and provide in-depth ideas to protect your site. If you still confused or have anything to share with me regarding the issue, feel free to let me know your concern, I would love to cooperate with you as soon as possible.