7 Ways To Protect Your Website From Hacking

A single day doesn’t go by without hearing about someone, or some group, penetrating a website and stealing credit card or other sensitive data from your websites.

A website isn’t merely a collection of templates, tools & plugins, but a collective online identity that represents your brand. you may have invested fortunes into it to keep it running and stay it safe against the hacks and malware attacks. if we forget to apply even basic Security hacks in order to protect their websites. that’s a mistake later turns into a disaster and results in data theft and website hacking.

1. UPDATES THEMES, PLUGINS & WIDGETS

If you have been using any popular Content Management System since long, you know what I mean. Outdated plugins, software & tools are the main reason behind frequent instances of hacking and websites being compromised. Have a close watch on when a plugin or CMS receives an update. As soon an updated version is available, hit the update button without delay. Hackers create automated bots to scan websites with vulnerabilities. They attack such websites and manage to gain control. This may be disastrous in case your website is involved in financial transactions

Always update the version. The best part is that these updates come quite frequently as developers understand the gravity of being hacked.

2.INSTALL PLUGINS AND ADD-ONS FROM TRUSTED DEVELOPERS:

There are thousands of plugins that they are part of cms platform that help me to add much -needed functionality my website. but not all the plugins in plugin gallery are trusted sources and free from security loopholes.

The third-party plugins might inject malicious code into the files. These codes, then infect the whole website & attackers manage to gain the control of your website.

Only experienced plugin developers have a better idea about the best security practices.

3.CREATE COMPLEX, UNIQUE & UNBREAKABLE PASSWORDS:

A strong, unique and complex admin password itself reduces chances of your website being hacked by 50%.

Make It Random:

Password cracking programs can guess several thousand passwords in minutes. They are programmed to break into passwordsInjected codes are intelligent enough to guess and break passwords that are made using real words and in a certain order. Unless you choose passwords using random words, you’ll be constantly under threat.

Choose A long One:

Passwords with 12+ characters are deemed the good one. They’re tough to memorize, thus, almost impossible to break into.

Pick The Unique One:

Just to avoid a memorizing bunch of passwords, don’t reuse them for different entities. Keep every single password unique to one. It itself reduces dramatically the instances of websites being compromised

4.User Access and Privileges:

In case you run a multi-author blog or the websites that require multiple logins, you should responsibly handle the job of role assignment to different users. It’s important that users have appropriate permissions to perform their job.

5.Change the Default CMS Settings:

WordPress, Joomla or any other CMS platform is installed with a default set of settings. Most of the attacks come through their default settings being used. This simply means that website owners can easily deflect and prevent a large number of attacks just by changing the default settings of CMS being used.

6.Server Configuration Settings:

Configuration files help to improve your website security.Some files allow administrators to execute server rules, including directives to enhance web security. Prevent directory browsing to prohibit malicious users from accessing and viewing the content.

A file like ‘web. config’ are some of the very powerful configuration files found in root web directory.

7.Install SSL Certificates:

SSL can’t directly help you protect a website from malicious attacks but encrypts the information transacted over the World Wide Web. It’s useful in the case of e-commerce websites as it protects visitors’ sensitive information and private data in transit.

Conclusion

These steps alone won’t guarantee the complete safeguard against the hacks and attacks, they will indeed stop the vast majority of automated attacks, reducing your overall risk.