There may come a time when the number of visitors on your eCommerce website dropped to zero. Even though your sales are going through, but you are losing a large chunk of money as your business has come to a standstill. Unfortunately, this is a consequence of your negligence regarding domain name security.
Domain security isn’t the most important thing that a website owner considers before establishing his/her platform. However, as there is an increased number of web-attackers reported recently, the security of a domain has become more important than ever. Cybercrimes are happening in multiple forms because people neglect the idea of protecting their respective domains. As a result, the website owners give the attackers the freedom of the internet to exploit security gaps consistently.
Practices for the Security of your Domain
The security of a domain is as important to you as your website visitors. Nowadays, internet users have become increasingly aware of cyber theft. Whichever website they land on, the first question they ask is about their safety and privacy. They want the website owners to come up with proofs to ensure that their website is safe to access. There is nothing worse for the reputation of a website if a security breach isolates all the credentials of a domain owner and the related login details. Therefore, the domain owner has to be proactive. To make it easy for you, we have shared a few practices to help you secure your website.
1. Register Domain Name in your own Account
If you want to know how to secure a domain name, keep in mind that you must register the domain name in your own account. Keeping a domain name in your identity is helpful in maintaining domain security.
Image taken from Strikingly
You can give your partners access to your domain without sharing the details of your actual account. By doing this, your partners or colleagues can access your domain without having the right to eliminate those products from your account. This is one of the common reasons why domain owners fail to protect their websites.
Many people turn to their partners, family members, or relatives for registering a domain and establishing a website. Years pass and many changes happen in your life. The relatives (who registered your domain) may move far away from you when the notification of domain renewal appears in front of you. Just because you made the payment for your domain, it doesn’t mean that the domain is yours.
Image taken from Strikingly
Strikingly has a subscription plan regarding the registration of domains. If you are in the first year of the Strikingly payment plan, you are considered eligible for one custom domain worth $24.95. If you are part of the monthly plan, then you must pay for the respective domains per year. On Strikingly, the price of the domain starts at $24.95 USD, depending upon the top-level domain (TLD) you consider (.com, .net, .org). You can consider your domain dashboard for checking the domain charges and their availability.
2. Use Strong Password
Adding password protection is one of the most important practices for maintaining domain security on your platform. When you add a password to secure your domain, make sure that it is a strong one. The strongest password isn’t determined by the number of characters it has, but by its uniqueness. The password should be almost impossible to guess. Make sure that you do not use the same password for your domain account as well as your email account. If you have used the same password across multiple platforms, it makes it easier for the attacker to access your accounts.
3. Protect Email via Two-Factor Authentication
If you feel that having strong password protection is enough to maintain domain security, you are mistaken. Even after including a strong password, some attackers still tend to find ways to get to your email. Email is pivotal in logging into your domain registrar account. Therefore, its protection adds layers of security and prevents domain thieves.
To improve your domain name security, make sure to add two-step verification on your website. When you enter a password, a unique code will be sent to your mobile phone. To log in to your website account, you have to add both your password as well as the mobile phone code. The best app in this regard is Google Authenticator, which means that the attackers must have physical access to your device to ensure that the code is sent to them.
Image taken from Strikingly
An email address is a huge part of your domain. Therefore, you must go to an extra yard to protect it. If some unknown person finds a way to your email, he/she can alter your valuable accounts as well as your domain name. It only takes a couple of clicks for you to reset your password, and before you know it, your account is compromised. Therefore, enabling two-factor authentication, including your email address, is crucial for a good domain security policy.
If you are reusing passwords across multiple platforms, you must update your account passwords regularly. If you want to secure a domain, there should be no margin for error. For example, if you are using the password “Strikingly123” to log into one of your websites, you must have a different password (such as “Amazon456”) for logging into another website. If both the websites have the same password, it makes it easy for domain thieves.
4. Domain Renewals
The easiest way of neglecting domain security is the inability to renew it. When you buy and register your custom domain, you would want to avoid the notifications of the expiry date. This is one of the reasons why you must have a complete understanding of your renewal process.
Image taken from Strikingly
The best way of eliminating this issue is to set up reminders. There are certain registrars that allow you to renew your domains around ten years in advance. In order to avoid any confusion, you can set up reminders so that notifications come to your system whenever you open it.
Renewing domains is an essential part of a domain security policy. When you register a domain with Strikingly and put it on auto-renewal, it will charge every year a week before the expiration date. This is helpful in the procedure of renewing domains as your website doesn’t go in an offline mode or grant more time for the renewal payment.
If your domain doesn’t auto-renew or we do not consider the charges from your card on file, it will result in the expiry of your domain and your website will be shut down. Within no time, you will see your domain getting released to the market.
5. Electronic Updates
Strikingly has always been a massive advocate of maintaining domain security policy. As per the Strikingly privacy policy, we utilize physical and electronic safeguards to protect your critical information. Like we have explained above, your account is password-protected, with the addition of having two-factor authentication for further securing your account.
If Strikingly learns of any security breach on your platform, we will update you electronically so that you take constructive steps to resolve it. By sharing personal information with us, we can communicate with you electronically about the security, administrative, and other domain issues regarding your use of websites, products, or services.
6. Phishing Attempts
If you want to know what is domain security, you will most likely come to know about phishing websites. Phishing websites are those websites that try to sneak into your critical details (username, password, bank details). If you are using any kind of email, you are likely to run into an email phishing attempt.
Image taken from Strikingly User’s Website
If you click on a link that brings you to a screen of username and password, make sure that you know about the website. If you are appearing on a website for the very first time, it is feasible for you not to include critical details in that website straight away. Instead, you can come to the website by verifying its authenticity and then log in.
Strikingly takes the privacy of accounts very seriously. We want to ensure a user-friendly and healthy experience for everyone associated with our platform. As clearly stated in our Terms and Conditions, we do not allow access to our platforms via a third party’s password or identification details for malicious reasons. We try to do all we can to prevent abuse of our rights. Therefore, if you find any malicious websites on our platform, do not waste any time filling out our form and reporting it to us. We will take that website down within 12 hours.
Conclusion
When you buy a domain name, it is important to secure it properly. Unfortunately, people think about the security of their domains until it is too late. The domain owners neglect the domain security policy when they are developing their websites. As a result of this neglect, the owners lose their domains, either by poor domain management strategies or hijacking.
Apart from the brand and reputational damages, it will take a long time for you to get back to where you were before. The recovery procedure of your website can be extremely time-consuming. Fortunately, there are several practices for you to ensure that you can protect your domain.
Moreover, you must also be careful with the personal information that you are giving out online. Regardless of the other website has an SSL certificate or not, if you show carelessness in exposing all of your personal information, you will be putting the reputation of your platform at risk. Strikingly has always been a strong advocate of maintaining a safe and secure website for everyone. If you have the same thoughts as we do, let’s collaborate and build a safe website.
