Recently, the ease of creating or building websites has expired. Because of the content management systems, such as WordPress, business owners consider themselves webmasters. The responsibility to protect your website is now in your hands. However, many business owners in the market do not have any credentials regarding website security.
When customers consider an online credit card system, they must know that their data is safe to use. Customers would never want their data to be in the hands of the wrong individuals. Whether you run a small business or an enterprise, your users must have a secure online experience.
However, you may wonder how to protect website consistently. To assure your customers and employees about the security of your website, there are many tips for you to look into. You do not get the trusting badges for no reason.
You cannot rely on one particular way to protect your website. It is about executing those practices consistently to remove your website’s vulnerability. Maintaining security on your website can be an easy and complex task at the same time. Even in the online world, there is a demand for keeping the data secure. If you have an online business website, you better be proactive instead of being reactive.
Ways To Improve Security of Your Website
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As a website owner, there is nothing more troublesome than you failing to protect website from hackers. As we see data breaches and hacks in our news headlines, you may wonder why they would come to the websites of small businesses. However, hacks do not occur in just the biggest businesses. You can look into our five ideal website security tips below for the welfare of your business before it is too late.
1. Integrate HTTPS and SSL Certificate
As a website owner, you may know how to look at the green lock icon and HTTPS in your website address bar if you provide sensitive information to your website. To protect your website, you must make your website HTTPS. These five letters may look small on your system display, but their importance regarding hacker security is a thousand times bigger. HTTPS ensures it is safe to integrate sensitive information into your website.
Image taken from Strikingly
Alongside that, a secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate is also important because it ensures transparency within the information that is getting transferred to the website, such as credit cards, contact information between the business owner and user. Although an SSL certificate is always important for an eCommerce website, every website now requires one.
Search Engines are also taking responsibility to secure your website as they want users to have a safe and secure experience while browsing the web. If we go one step further, search engines may rank your websites lower than your expectations if you do not have an SSL certificate associated with your website.
Strikingly provides you an opportunity to make your site HTTPS by simply enabling the option in the settings panel. This strategy is free for all incoming visitors. Our platform has a partnership with Let’s Encrypt, which enables the customers to achieve SSL approvals on their websites without indulging in any overhead costs. To protect your website, there is no need to go through the entire procedure of acquiring a potential security certificate. If you have any queries, do not hesitate and email us at support@strikingly.com or come to the live chat box and interact with our Happiness Officers.
2. Select a Smart Password
The selection of smart passwords is a simple and effective strategy to protect your website. It is pretty common to look for a password that is easy to remember, which is why the most common password is still ‘12345’. However, it is not about the ease of remembering, it is about the safety of your data. You must be creative in your password choices so you can protect the website from hackers.
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You must attempt to generate an effective password for your platform. Or, you can look into the password-generating tools to choose better passwords. Make sure that your password is long and full of different characters (special character, uppercase, lower-case, numbers). For example, you can add your birthday or your child’s name. If the hacker identifies all your external details, he will start guessing your password and may eventually get to it.
After a couple of months, make sure to change your password and save it on your mobile phone (notepad). Smart passwords are long and have at least 12 characters to protect your website. Your password must have a combination of different kinds of characters and symbols. Do not forget to use upper-cases and lower-cases.
On the Strikingly platform, you can now add passwords on the individual pages of a website. For that, you must build a members-only page or a private store, depending upon your choice to keep your data secure.
3. Consider Administrative Packages
Initially, you may feel comfortable granting your website access to your experienced employees or partners of other companies. You give all your employees and partners administrative privileges, believing that they will use your website properly. Although it is good to have a joint venture, it is not an ideal strategy to protect your website.
Unfortunately, employees or partners do not understand the importance of website security tips. Or maybe, when there are meetings regarding the security of the website, only the business owner is part of it and the other partners are not given any instructions regarding it. When they log in to the CMS, they always prioritize their task over the security of the website. If you want to activate the administrative access, you can do that by checking out the ‘Team’ option of Strikingly.
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If they commit a mistake or do not understand the severity of the situation, they bring significant risks to the website. Therefore, it is important to give proper guidelines to your partners before giving them website access. You must ask if they have experience of using CMS or they know what to do to refrain from a security breach.
You must understand that your partners and employees have as big a responsibility as you to protect your website. Therefore, you should make them understand the importance of CMS passwords, HTTPS and SSL certificates, and administrative packages. Ensure that you have communicated with them about how they can maintain the security of your website.
To keep a track of people using your website or having administrative privileges, you must create a record and update it consistently. The employees are not permanent in your business. They come and go. Similarly, there are many partners in the world with whom you can create joint ventures. One of the most ideal ways to prevent security issues is to maintain a record of the people who access your website or have administrative privileges. You must show maturity in giving users access. It is not a bunch of toffees that you can just spread randomly to people.
Difference between HTTP and HTTPS
If you look forward to knowing the details, you will understand that there are websites having HTTPS in their URL address, whereas some only have HTTP. Why is that? Can you protect your website with both of them? In simple words, the ‘S’ in HTTPS stands for security. It ensures that you can secure your website. When you visit a website of HTTPS, you will see that all of your personal information (name, email, phone number) is secured.
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Now, you may wonder that how SSL and HTTPS maintain the website security of your platform. SSL acts like a dead-end between the hackers and the website. With SSL, the hackers cannot make their way into the website. For example, a hacker may integrate a program on server hosting and wait for the users to type their personal information into the system. If the website is not secured (having HTTP), the hackers will find it easy to grasp all the user’s personal details. They wouldn’t be able to do this with a website having an HTTPS or SSL certificate. Even though this is a minor detail, it can make or break your website. Therefore, you have to be careful.
Conclusion
As a business owner or an administrator, you may build a website and forget to integrate it into your daily working plan. Although the establishment of a website has become as easy as it has ever been, it doesn’t change that you must work considerably to protect your website.
If you want to protect website from hackers, you must always secure your business and customer’s data. Whether your operating system accepts online credit card payments or not, your visitor’s data must not fall into the wrong hands.
Engaging with us in Strikingly will enable you to create a strong relationship between the business owner and a customer. Even though many countries require ‘Terms and Conditions’ or ‘Privacy Policy’ sections on their sites, we have created a way for you to write a privacy policy for your website easily. However, you must understand how to choose your privacy policy properly. It is not just about you or your business, but it is about the user’s safety when accessing your website. Therefore, be careful in your approach in protecting your website.
