Website security is a sad reality of life in a digital world. In the more analog, brick and mortar days you’d make sure the doors were locked at night, the alarm turned on and that was about it. A pretty simple, clear cut process.
Heaven forbid someone broke into your store, the filing of an insurance claim, maybe cleaning up some glass and you’re back in business.
Website Security
But in a digital world, security is a lot harder. Both in terms of the actual plan to prevent illegal entry and what happens after entry.
It seems every day some new malware or other malicious software is online and ready to wreak havoc. And unless you are a security expert, we often need to rely on others for some form of help.
The Basics
The most basic forms of protection are making sure any patches or software updates that have been released are installed immediately.
In the case of WordPress, which represents 30% of the nearly one billion websites online, the task to update is easy. It just requires you actually doing it. And more so, checking at least once a day.
UpEarly offers a monitoring service for a nominal yearly charge, Website Monitoring. We’ve also written a few posts previously on the subject of security, Is My Website Safe and Website Security Tips to learn more.
Login
Making your login that much more difficult is a critical step. And if possible, using a secure means of transmitting your login credentials, such as an SSL. Or if you rely on FTP for file transfer, make sure you are using a secure method as well such as SFTP. In the case of Managed Word Press sites offered by Go Daddy you likely have an SFTP account.
Your username and password should be complex. They should involve a number of characters, both alpha and numeric as well as other characters and the use of upper and lower case.
Htaccess
All Word Press sites and many other sites have a file called .htaccess. Which can play a vital role in making your site as secure as possible. If you want to make entry that much more difficult, then hire someone (or contact us) to learn more about what you can do.
Changes to this file can allow you to add layers of security that will make entry, malicious scripts and much more that much harder to introduce.
Insurance
Today you need to have a strategy in place before something bad happens. You need to make sure you are backing up files and database(s) once a day.
If or when something happens, and your site is shut down what will you do? How will you react? Who will you contact.
Plan ahead. It may seem like overkill but considering how many sites are hacked each day, it’s more of a numbers game. A game of probability for all of us.
At a minimum, improve your odds by adding as many layers of security as possible.