How To Ensure Your Website's Security

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If you manage a website for your business, then it is important to make sure that you keep it safe and secure at all times. You don’t want customer information to be hacked, and you also don’t want the website to need to be down due to a lack of security. Here are three ways that you can help ensure your website keeps safe and secure.

Update Software

You should always keep your website up to date. This means making sure that any software for your website is updated the second that the developers release a patch or new version. Keeping your software up to date ensure that it is better protected against hacks and other intrusions to your website. This applies to small things such as the plugins you use to allow people to leave comments or more important aspects such as payment and login systems. If you don’t keep your software up to date and you are hacked, then it could very well be because you didn’t update that you were targeted and successfully hacked. Any software should updated to the newest versions, and this applies outside of your website and your smartphones as well.

Passwords

When accessing your website, you will need passwords to enter admin areas. These passwords need to be as strong as possible so that nobody else can access these important areas. If for some reason you lose your password, or somebody does gain access to your site, then you should follow your disaster recovery plan. This will help you know what to do if anything goes wrong and act accordingly. If you have planned in advance for such eventualities, then they won’t be such a surprise if and when they do happen. When it comes to creating a password though, you need to make sure that you use capital letters, numbers and symbols in order to have the strongest possible password. You also need to make sure that it isn’t something that someone can guess or one that you use for other websites. This is because if somebody gains one password, you don’t want them to have full access to every single account you have across the internet.

HTTPS

HTTPS is a more secure version of HTTP. It is a guarantee to visitors that they access the website that they expected and that nobody is accessing or changing the content that they are seeing. You want to make sure that your website is using HTTPS as it is far more secure and gives visitors peace of mind. It is also great for if you have things that visitors might want to keep private such as payment details. In cases like this, you should definitely be using HTTPS to make sure that important information like that isn’t being accessed by people who shouldn’t. There are plenty of ways that you can set up HTTPS for your website, and it is nowhere near as expensive as it used to be to set up encryption. Google has also said that having HTTPS rather than the older HTTP will also increase your search engine results ranking, so there is also that incentive to use it as well.