Is Your Website Secured? or How would you feel if you woke up one day and found out that your website had been hacked or maybe your website being suspended by your hosting company or even worse maybe it’s completely disappeared or being replaced by something you definitely don’t want your customers to see?
These are the questions you should think of before going online. And if you are planning to launch your first website then just read how to safeguard your website from hackers.
We all know hacking is something that takes control of everything we own online either it is a website or any client or server. It becomes quite irritating if such a thing happens. You may not be aware of the same but chances are your website or WordPress is open to hackers and they can very easily take control of your entire website.
There are many reasons hackers hack a website and the main reason could be for getting a credit card details of your visitors if you are using transactional service but this is not the only case for them, there are other like get visitors data, getting contact information of your visitors or getting details of hosting servers and also for sending spam messages to your subscribers to market someone’s product and there are many other reasons for them to hack a website.
No doubt a hosting company needs to make sure that nobody enters their server from any side and all the entrances are fully secured but being an owner of your website, you also need to keep your website secure.
I am not going to go into deep on how the hackers hack the website but I will suggest few points for you guys to at least secure your website but only if you think you have sensitive data. We, Will, discuss websites that contain sensitive data or websites which are simple and have no data, or I would say has no sensitive data.
First, let’s look at non-sensitive websites:- these are the websites that contain only information and have not associated with any third party for transactional purposes.
No personal information is stored or captured or not involved in any kind of eCommerce activity and has no user data of any kind or in other words, just a plain site with some information.
These in simple words are non-sensitive websites/blogs and now the vice-versa are sensitive websites. Which means websites that contain
- Subscriber’s Data
- Capture Credit Card Data
- Visitors Data (not all the visitors are a subscriber)
- Data
- Companies Data
- Paid Software etc.
- Any other sensitive data
How to Secure our Website / WordPress For Free
Now, if you are looking for free tools to secure your website then I would suggest better use WordPress over HTML websites.
Now, here is the important part.
How to secure your website or WordPress blog when you have no knowledge about tools available in the market? if you have a simple website (not WordPress) with no sensitive data then you just need to do below things…
- Keep a backup of your website (Very Important)
- Keep account Username/Password from your domain and hosting company at a safe place.
- Regularly change your login passwords and keep it strong or use Google recommended passwords.
- Free Security Tools (Please search on Google, there are many) or you can select a website hosting company that includes security tools with hosting or domain purchase.
- Get domain and hosting on a yearly basis and keep renewing it every year.
Backup is very important because in case your website gets hacked but if you have a backup of your website then you can immediately log-in to your cPanel and remove everything on your site’s root directory…
it is something like formatting a hard drive and upload a fresh copy. Most of the time, it will solve your problem but make sure you have a latest backup of your website so that you can upload the same again. So, make sure to perform regular automated backups.
Data backup is your first line of defense because if your data is safe you’ve got a good chance that you can recover but if in case, you are unable to log-in to your dashboard then you need to contact your hosting provider and domain provider and ask them to help you out from this…
Sometimes you get access easily and sometimes not and in that case when you are not able to log-in from any source, just wait for your domain to expire…
And if you are running your website on WordPress then there are a number of security plugins you can use for free like wordfence or Anti-Virus/Anti-Malware plugin or limit login limits plugin. Also, use free captcha plugins on “login” and “contact us” form to prevent bot attacks.
How to Secure my Website / WordPress with Sensitive Data
Now, this is very crucial, this should be the first question in your mind before you even start making a website if you are going to capture or have sensitive data on your site. Below we will be discussing the points to secure a website or blog …
Nowadays, most of the developers build websites based on CMS and use WordPress, etc and there are a number of free and paid plugins one can use to secure site from brute-force attack. So we will not be discussing plugins here but will discuss a few things that need to be done before installing your WordPress and comes along with domain
1. HTTPs:
Always go with https… you must have seen or noticed http before www on all the websites. Now, HTTP stands for hyper text transfer protocol… don’t worry if you don’t understand this terminology. But this is the one that tells us if your domain is secured or not.
Every secure domain will have “HTTPS” before www where “S” stands for secure. To be sure, just check ecommerce website or bank website or paypal … they all are secured with https.
While buying domain, you will have an option to select SSL certificate… just go for it to secure. This is how it looks like. Many hosting providers give it free with their domain/hosting service.
2. Account Protection:
This is another option one can use to secure your personal or administrative details from hackers. Whenever we register our domain and hosting, we need to provide administrative detail like contact number, email id of the person who register the domain and will handle the same in future as well.
If not secured, the same are openly available to everyone and hackers by using this data can breach any website. Anyone can check details of the person using sites like whois.com
So to make the same private (means no body could see your personal details online), you need to buy personal detail protection service. Not necessary though but this is one of the security measures you can take if you want to…
3. Use Updated Software:
This is quite an ignored point but very crucial when we are talking about cyber-attacks.
Hackers always try to find out the loopholes in your blog or website, basically, they’re looking for any weakness in your website that they can exploit and can enter your website via outdated software or weak passwords or maybe something else, so make sure to keep your website software up to date.
4. Captcha:
This is another good free tool for everyone. It saves you from spammers and from hackers as well. If you are using WordPress then you can install one of the plugins called Advanced noCaptcha & invisible Captcha.
It will ask you to prove that you are not a bot and a real human who is trying to login. This tool can be used with many things like…
- Login Form
- Registration Form
- Multisite User Signup Form
- Lost Password Form
- Reset Password Form
- Comment Form
- bbPress New topic
- bbPress reply to the topic
- BuddyPress register
- WooCommerce Checkout
Now, we have covered many things in securing your website or blog. One can use many other options available online but these are the major things one needs to focus on to secure your website. I hope you liked this article and if yes, please do share with your friends and families to keep them aware of cyber-attacks. Goodbye!