5 Tips to Keep Your Website Secure in 2020

Not only is your website the foundation of your online business presence, but if you’ve started simply as a hobby blogger and done the job right, your website can grow into a business. Veterans are not simply ex-members of the armed forces, but people with a long and in-depth experience in that field, and we live in times when experienced information is the new currency. Of course, this is also the main reason why there’s a growing number of hackers, eager to exploit the available information.

A good website is like an online container of valuable information, and therefore a natural target of hackers. Especially in the case of veteran-produced content, which tackles sensitive information about governments, investigations, warzones, etc. Last year’s data breach investigation report shows that 43% of victims were small business owners. 60% of these owners go out of business within the time frame of 6 months after the breach. It damages their reputation so customers simply lose trust, and there are also fines for losing sensitive information. This is why your website needs to be more than a simple online container for information – it needs to become an impenetrable vault. So let’s take a look at the best strategies that will turn it into one.

Go for a Reputable Building

Your website is your virtual office, so you should treat it this way. Hosting providers are responsible for keeping the whole building safe since your website is located on a server provided by them. Servers also get hacked, and you can’t control how secure they are. But what you can control is your choice of hosting provider. Reputable hosting providers will never compromise on security, while the cheap ones usually do. That means your choice shouldn’t be based on attractive prices but on a good reputation – always go for providers that are already used by other veterans who have already established a trusted business.

Choose Your Neighborhood Carefully

Availability of content in some geographical regions can turn your website into a desirable target worthy of a hacking effort. Although geo-restriction is today mainly associated with strict content-related copyright regulations and therefore mostly used by giant content providers such as HBO, Netflix, Amazon, etc., it is still a great way of protection. Similarly, it is used by many casinos such as SkyCity Online Casino which has added geo-restriction as an additional layer of safety, so not everyone can access it. Websites that are producing content about the private life of stars also use it to protect that information from the prying eyes, and veteran knowledge is clearly far more sensitive. To sum up – exposure in the wrong places is like sending an open invitation to hackers.

Lock & Bolt Your Door

Metaphorically speaking, now that your office building is safe and in the right neighborhood, you need to take charge of locking your door. Using a secure password should be a no-brainer, but it turns out that many people actually don’t use their brains when it comes to (in)secure logins. To make sure no one will guess it, but also that no one can use a brute-force program to break it, you need to come up with a complex password, preferably consisting of multiple random words that ideally contain special characters and numbers.

After you’ve locked your door with a password, it’s time to bolt it. You need a high-quality security service that will regularly scan your website form all forms of malicious code, analyzing every bit of traffic coming in and out of your website server. Web application firewalls are the best option, and the choice is vast. Some are solely software, some hardware-based, and the most popular choices are cloud-based. You will need to prepare for some upfront costs, but it will definitely pay off in the long run.

Hide Your Spare Key

It’s not rare that multiple users have access to business websites, which means you can have a lot of spare keys, and hackers can target each of them. When there’s a hot situation like the current one with Iran, there’ll be more need for various veteran insights and certainly more people writing content about it, and only one breach can make all hell break loose. If all these people are only using passwords, it’s like leaving a spare key under the mat. This situation requires to protect your website further by adding two-factor authentication (2FA). That way all users will require a short code (sent to their email or phone number) in addition to their password, meaning that hackers who do get their hands on any passwords will remain empty-handed.

Mark Yourself Safe

In an era when cyberattacks are thriving, it’s important to let your potential visitors and customers that your website is safe. They can’t possibly be aware of all the protection strategies you’ve employed, so you need to use an encrypted SSL protocol that will protect their information as it’s shuttled between the database and your website. It will create an encryption that will make it incredibly difficult for anyone without authorization to access your website and its traffic. Users and customers will see a green icon in the corner of the URL field and know they’re safe, and it will also boost your online standing since Google ranks more secure websites higher.

As we’ve said, securing your website is about treating it as you would an office – you need a reputable building, a safe neighborhood, strong locks, and hidden keys. Keep in mind that online space is constantly expanding which inevitably leads to smaller security cracks, so make sure you keep all your software updated that will enable you to seal them up as they appear.