Statistics from 2023 reveal that there are more than 1.13 billion websites on the internet. New businesses emerge every day, and the first thing they do to connect with their customers is build a website. However, there are hackers and attackers who try to bring down a website either to get ransom or to direct traffic to a competitor’s site.
We need cybersecurity to protect our website from such sick moves in both cases. It protects our sites from getting hacked or attacked and prevents unauthorized access and exploitation of web content, data, resources, etc.
Cybersecurity Best Practices for Website
There are some simple and best cybersecurity practices to keep your website protected against hacking or other attacks:
Use Unique & Strong Passwords
The thought of your website getting hacked can give you nightmares, especially when you have gone through this already. Passwords are the first and foremost step to prevent unauthorized access. Each website account has a password to give a certain level of access to each user, such as administrator or user.
Sites using simple and easy passwords can easily get hacked as such passwords can be easily guessed. Hence, using strong passwords is highly recommended. A strong password never uses the name of your company or the owner.
A strong password has more than 8 characters. It includes uppercase and lowercase letters, special symbols, and numeric digits such as “$QW4hd9JzT%”.
Set Multi-Factor Authentication
Using strong passwords is an excellent method to protect your website from cybercrimes, but adding more authentication methods will make it more secure. Nearly all site owners at least use 2-step verification.
For this, they mostly use other mobile devices or email IDs to grant permission for logging in. Multi-factor authentication is crucial as the passwords can be cracked using tools and brute force attacks.
This feature will let you know that someone is trying to access your website with or without your permission. Hence, you can act on the spot by catching them red-handed or blocking access. It will strongly discourage the hacker or attacker from accessing your site for any ill purpose.
Use HTTPS with SSL
HTTPS is a more secure extension of HTTP. This hypertext transfer protocol uses encryption (via SSL/TLS) to securely transfer data between the browser and the website over any network, especially the internet.
Additionally, an SSL certificate adds security and credibility to your website by encrypting data in transit and verifying the server’s identity. However, while HTTPS protects data during transmission, it does not make a website immune to cyberattacks; additional security measures are needed to protect the server and website as a whole.
Backup Web Content & Other Data
Web content and the data on your web server are the only reasons your users visit your website repeatedly. Simple, good, and well-organized content not only ranks up your website but also brings more traffic. However, losing your web content and data will be a significant loss for you.
This is why it’s essential to choose a reliable web hosting provider that offers secure storage and regular backup options. We highly recommend you make backups regularly. Backup will copy your current website and its attachments to a safe server provided by your web host. You can restore this backup anytime if your website has any cybersecurity-related issues.
Keep Your Hardware & Software Updated
The latest computer hardware is more secure with mechanisms like TPM modules. It is crucial for the web admin to use one such hardware to run and maintain the website. These computer systems have hardware that can physically stop hackers and attackers from accessing the system through any network.
On the other hand, your operating system, also known as OS, is at the highest priority when it comes to updates. Most updates enhance the security features. The Defender, antiviruses, and firewalls help protect your system from hacking and other attacks. Similarly, other tools and plugins for running and maintaining the website must have their latest versions.
Use Data Encryption Tools
You must have heard this a million times: you can always regenerate the information if the data is present, but you can never regenerate the data. Data is also time-consuming and costly; hence, losing is considered a great loss.
Hence, you should use tools and techniques to encrypt your data, even if they are paid. Encryption will convert your simply readable data into an unreadable form, which is also known as ciphertext. Ciphertext is a highly encoded form of your data that is present on the web server.
Monitor Your Website Activities Regularly & Scan It Occasionally
Implementing everything mentioned above wouldn’t be enough to keep your website secure. Continuously monitoring your site is also a crucial cybersecurity practice. On one hand, enabling server logs allows you to keep an eye on the user activities. On the other hand, the access logs represent the access attempts from an unauthorized person.
You can make your site more secure by installing a firewall (WAF) that will block suspicious traffic. Use antimalware security plugins to scan your website for viruses regularly. Similarly, installing the tools or plugins to save your website from DoS attacks is highly recommended.
Conclusion
There are multiple practices that you can implement simultaneously to enhance the cybersecurity of your website. First of all, you should use unique and complex passwords with multi-factor authentications. Accessing such a site gives hackers and attackers a hard time.
Using SSL certificates with HTTPS protocol is highly recommended as the cybercriminals have the tools to penetrate the older Hypertext Transfer Protocol with no Secure Socket Layer security. Both of these protections will not only encrypt your web content and data but also guide the hackers and attackers to fake versions of your website, which will waste their time and effort.
Regularly taken backups will allow your website to recover easily without much loss. Similarly, using secure hardware to run and maintain your website is crucial. Hence, your computer system must have the TPM module enabled. Your OS and other plugins must be updated to the latest versions.