Website Security: Tips for Securing Your Website
Filed under: PHP Database Development, Web Usability —
Doug Williams @
5:40 am
This blog entry was posted on July 12, 2009.
Securing your website means defending your web business against threats. Hackers concentrate their efforts on web-based applications such as shopping carts, forms, login pages, dynamic content, etc. Website security not only protects your data, your client’s information, but also your SEO rankings.
If your site is hacked, your website can be quickly dropped from the search engine results. Even a temporary loss of traffic can be painful. There is no way to know how long it can take to recover lost SEO rankings. Your website security policies should be considered as part of your website traffic strategies.
Tips for securing your website:
- Passwords: Use strong passwords with 8 or more characters and include a mix of capital letters, lower case, numeric and special characters. You can still make them memorable such as this secure version of the word password: Pa55W0rd!
- Upgrade: If you use third party web applications such as WordPress, pay attention to new releases. When they include patches for security vulnerabilities, upgrade as soon as possible. By the time a security problem is fixed, there are hackers already exploiting it.
- Vulnerability Scanning: There are services and tools available that will scan your website for known vulnerabilities and weaknesses. This feedback can give website owners and administrators the knowledge they need to tighten up web applications, firewalls and other areas.
- Backup: Keep backups of your website and databases. If your website is hacked, you will need a recent copy to restore your website from. Better website hosting services maintain daily, weekly and monthly copies of websites on file.
Related posts:
Absolutely vital – the advice I would give all webmasters/domain owners is:
1) Know the companies you registered your domain with and have your website hosting through. If your contact details are listed on the WHOIS of your domain, except to receive postcards through the mail of companies claiming to be the company you registered your domain through. This is a scam. Know which companies you need to deal with.
2) Don’t make your password easy enough for hackers to guess. Much like the need to change your router’s login information from “admin/admin”, if the back-end to your admin panel has an easy-to-guess password like “1234″, “abc”, or “password”, you will get hacked.
Comment by Adam Bullock — July 13, 2009 @ 9:03 am