As a website owner, it’s important to take measures to protect your site from hackers. While there is no guaranteed way to prevent your site from being hacked, there are some steps you can take to make it more difficult for hackers to access your site. In this blog post, we’ll share seven ways to keep your website safe from hackers.
1. Stay Up-To-Date
When it comes to software (core systems or plugins), you’ll want to make sure you’re using the latest version. This is because vulnerabilities in older software are often discovered when new software version launches. For example, once Apache launched a new version of their web server software, they found a vulnerability in an old version of the software that could have allowed someone to hijack a website thanks to a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability.
WordPress made headlines recently when it announced that 3.7 million websites were hacked due to a vulnerability in the WordPress core install. A patch to fix this vulnerability was released by the WordPress team in versions 3.7.2 and 3.6.4. Updating your WordPress software is crucial to fixing these types of vulnerabilities, so to stay secure, your WordPress site should always be updated to the most recent version.
2. Guard Your Admin Credentials Closely
The biggest risk to your website’s security is your own negligence. By far, most websites are hacked because someone directly or inadvertently gives away their user credentials. For example, a site may be attacked by an infected email containing malware that seeks out specific URL parameters. This is known as a SQL injection attack, and it can be prevented with a simple parameter masking function.
Keep your website software up to date. Hackers can often use software vulnerabilities to access your website and install malware. Regularly updating your website software makes these vulnerabilities less likely to be exploited. Use a secure internet connection to connect with an ISP (Internet Service Provider). Hackers can sometimes use an insecure connection to gain access to your website over the internet.
3. Install Active Monitoring
Using an active monitoring solution will allow you to actively manage your website’s security. One of the most common vulnerabilities on websites is known as SQL Injection Attacks. Active monitoring will identify these common attacks and warn you before they can do any harm to your site.
4. Use HTTPS
HTTPS encrypts the data transferred between a user’s browser and your website. Any user can tell whether a website is secure with the little green lock in the browser address bar.
There are several benefits to using HTTPS, such as:
- Helps indicate that your site is trusted by internet users.
- It can prevent traffic interception between parties.
- Acts like a barrier to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks.
5. Install an SSL Certificate
Security is one of the biggest reasons to install an SSL Certificate on your WordPress website. What is an SSL Certificate? It’s a digital certificate issued by a certificate authority that uses strong encryption techniques that protect your website against common attacks like login brute force and session hijacking. A fully encrypted site doesn’t only help protect your WordPress website against site hacking attacks, but it also increases your search engine ranking for security-minded customers.
6. Monitor The Logs on a Regular Basis
Logs will show attempted attacks, which in turn will show you how to patch vulnerabilities. This is the best way to prevent malicious hackers from succeeding in their attempts. Keep your software updated. Software updates often contain security patches that significantly decrease the chances that your site will be hacked. Back up your website regularly.
7. Client-Side Caching
Use a client-side caching system to speed up your website. This makes it hard for hackers to execute malicious code, because each time the code is executed, it’s modified. This can prevent hackers from infecting your website.
Because this code changes each time it’s executed, it’s very difficult for hackers to hack it. Common caching systems include Varnish and Memcache.
8. Choose a Secure Hosting Provider
Choosing a secure hosting provider with robust security features is the most important thing you can do to ensure your website is secure. Look for security certificates and they’re updated regularly, 24/7 monitoring, a dedicated server with limited access, and remote desktop services. There are also web hosting providers that offer additional security features like anti-virus software and malware protection.
9. Password-protected directories
In order to hack your website, the hacker needs to gain access to the root directory or another directory which is allowed by the web server’s configuration. Most web security experts recommend that folders not be accessible directly from the web. The only exception to this is for directories that actually contain public information. For example, a human resources directory may contain public job descriptions, so it would make sense to make the folder available from the web.