Your website and its content are very valuable. It goes without saying that you must maintain a high level of security in order to ensure its sustainability. Being the target of a hack can quickly become a nightmare for any business. This is why it is important to put in place good practices to make your website safe and keep your peace of mind. Some of the best and well-known SaaS websites are using these strategies to help them maintain security. So, here are some helpful tips on keeping your website safe too.
Make updates
The software and the CMS of your website must be up to date in order to benefit from the new protections to overcome the weaknesses of previous versions. If your website has a WordPress type CMS, updates are automatically reported in your administration dashboard. You should then check the entire website to make sure that the new update does not cause hassle on other levels, such as the front display for example.
Save your website
A secure website is a site with a backup. A backup copy will allow you to get your website back online quickly if it were to be hacked. The hosts offer automatic backups at various frequencies, either weekly or daily, of all your files that were used to create the website and its database. There are also different backup methods, either a full backup or an incremental backup. An incremental backup only makes a copy of your changes since you ran the previous backup but is faster.
A full backup is a demanding operation that can slow down your service during the process. The longer you keep your backup copies, the more flexibility you will have to identify problems and correct them with backup restores. However, the space needed for storage copies must be larger.
Install SSL Certificate (HTTPS)
The term HTTPS or HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure consists of setting up a security protocol that guarantees the users of your website the confidentiality of their information. More specifically, this protocol ensures that shared data is sent to your site’s server and is encrypted, making it impossible to misuse it for dishonest purposes.
Following the initiatives of technological giants like Google in recent years, more than half of the web is now encrypted and secure via the HTTPS protocol. An SSL certificate enables the secure transmission of information between the server, the user, and your website. In addition, an SSL certificate demonstrates to the user that your website is secure and therefore without risk of use.
Strengthen your passwords
It is easier but less secure to use a password that is easy to remember. To counter the danger, people are often advised to change this password frequently. However, the danger here is that the person might use a weaker password so that they can remember it easily. A more difficult password is certainly more effective. To help you with managing all of your passwords, there are solutions like 1Password. This software is a password manager that allows you to generate and keep secure passwords, as well as notes and documents.
Implement user management
Set up complete management of users, their roles, and rights of use. It is possible to create user accounts with management rights only on a limited set of content. Roles are defined on the platform by an administrator, allowing the modification, creation, and definition of new roles.
Take precautions when uploading files
Uploading files, whether to attach a resume, portfolio or otherwise can sometimes be dangerous. Although an antivirus provides an additional layer of security, the first line of defense in protecting your computer is your judgment and your ability to detect risks. If your business can do without attachments in a form, why add such a function? This reduces the risk of implanting malware.
Optimize performance and stability
I recommend integrating different optimization solutions into the website to ensure a seamless experience for visitors. These measures also protect your installations from possible attacks. These steps are more technical and may require help from a web specialist.
CloudFlare
CloudFlare is a company that offers security services and performance. One of the services offered consists of content replication in proxy (intermediate) mode in order to lighten the load on the hosting server and also to protect it during traffic peaks. CloudFlare also offers load balancing services which may prove useful in the event of significant changes in daily traffic.
Wp-Rocket
It is a plugin for WordPress used to cache dynamic content. This lightens the server by avoiding requests to the database and redundant data processing. It keeps a “pre-processed” copy which expires after a configurable time or which can be purged automatically when updating the content. WP-Rocket offers a very clear performance improvement and is globally recognized as the best cache plug-in by the community.
ITheme Security Pro
Since a large site could undoubtedly be the target of malicious people, it is important to protect it well. I recommend installing the iTheme Security Pro plug-in. The latter offers a variety of features that allow you to easily and quickly tighten the security of the WordPress CMS. These include, but are not limited to, IP blocking resulting from repeated login attempts, strengthening of complex passwords, and malware detection.