Top Tips to Secure Your Website from Hackers

September 22, 2016

Picture of padlock surrounded by cloud

How much stock do you place on the security of your website?  Are you just assuming that your content and your site are safe?  Or do you proactively take measures to ensure that it is?

 

Unfortunately, too many website owners don’t take any type of preventative measures.  Instead, they have faith in their web hosting service, thinking that everything is nice and secure.  This is not to say that all hosting services are unsafe and don’t offer protection.  Quite the opposite – premium hosting services are recommended and offer greater protection than paying for a cheap shared service that unfortunately most people go for. 

.

People start to worry when they wake up one morning and the site has disappeared.  Or there is a big notice to say that you’ve been hacked.  It has happened to me in the past and if you don’t prepare now it will happen to you as well.  My tip – don’t wait until it happens to you.  It isn’t that difficult to put a few precautions in place and secure your website along with all of your hard work.

 

Simple things you can do to improve the security of your website include ensuring all of your updates are done. This means that you have to regularly log into your site and check for updates. Just remember that it is wise to perform a backup of your website before performing any major updates. This way if something goes wrong, you still have your old copy.

 

Backups can be easily performed from within your hosting account or by using WordPress plugins if your site is running on WordPress.  You can easily set scheduled backups on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. This is a great idea and once set you know you will always have a backup of your site, just in case.

 

Another way to keep your site secure is to have a hard to guess admin and password combination. While most people use Admin as their user name for WordPress sites, this isn’t a great idea. It is an easy guess for any hacker. Try to use something else and then have a password that is a mixture of numbers and letters. You may want to use a password generator to help you come up with great passwords.

 

One of the best measures you can put into place is to use a website security plugin. There are different ones to choose from and they offer an added layer of protection. Depending on which one you choose, they will email you when any file changes are detected. This way you can see if someone was trying to attempt to log into your site.

 

Use these basic tips to secure your website today. At the very least this will make it difficult for anyone to hack your site. Plus you will have gained an additional layer of confidence that your website is safe and secure.

If you have any questions about securing your site, you can email me at tim@timlumsdendigital.com.

You may also like