5 Ways to Secure Your Website from Hackers

Featured article by Calvin Paige, Independent Technology Author

According to Sucuri, 1% of the world’s total websites are currently hacked or infected, which is approximately 9 million websites. It is therefore essential you take measures to ensure your website doesn’t succumb to a hack attack. Read our five top tips to help you keep your website safe and secure at all times.

Choose Safe Plugins

Hackers have a knack for working their way into your website via plugins. In fact, one of the leading causes of hackings is due to out-dated plugins on a WordPress website. You should therefore update any plugins and remove any that are no longer in use. Hackers can easily identify vulnerabilities in a website, so don’t present them with an opportunity to take it down in an instant.

A Strong Password

It probably goes without saying that you must feature a strong password if you want to create a secure website. However, when we say strong, we don’t mean using the name of your childhood pet or primary school in Nottingham. A robust password offers a combination of letters, numbers and symbols that are almost impossible to guess. Also, ensure the password has a minimum of eight characters and includes uppercase and lowercase letters.

Network Security

Nothing is more reliable to a website than network security. Not only will you receive content security, data storage and disaster recovery, but the online security team can respond to your issue within approximately 10 minutes, depending on the provider. With an alert system in place for potential threats, the monitoring services will allow you to focus on the business over security issues. So you can trust your websites, software, emails and wireless will be in safe hands with an experienced IT specialist.

Avoid File Uploads

File uploads can often pose a significant website security risk, no matter how innocent they may appear. The script could hack into your website, which is why you should be suspicious of every file upload. Unless you know exactly where the file came from and what is inside, avoid uploading it to your website or you could regret it.

Always Backup

The one saving grace to a hacked website is a handy backup, yet so many people fail to back up their sites. You have at least 60 days for backups so use it wisely, because you will be happy you did should you become the prey of a hacker. You can simply remove all the infected files by restoring your website with the backup files, so it runs as well as it always has, allowing you to tighten up your security controls going forward.

Other handy tips include limiting your website’s administrative privileges, deleting old contributors from an account and incorporating two-factor authentication into the admin area.

Your website requires more than just one of the actions above to become secure. You should therefore take a series of measures to create a well-protected website that is not vulnerable to hackers from across the world.