Why Your Website Security Matters Now More Than Ever
Cybersecurity, hacking, data breaches — these are the words that every business dreads. A report earlier in the year, by cybersecurity firm Shape Security, revealed that 80%–90% of the login attempts made on retailers’ websites are hackers using stolen data. No wonder business owners like you are wearier and more aware of website security than ever before.
According to a study by KPMG, 19% of consumers would stop shopping at a retailer altogether following a breach; 33% would take a break from shopping there for an extended period. With these stats, online retailers can’t afford to take a relaxed view towards website security, especially with Black Friday and Cyber Monday coming up.
Your customers value security: to trust your brand, they need to feel safe when browsing your products online. Just as they need reassurance, we want to reassure you that you can easily achieve website security and safety.
5 Ways We Ensure Our Clients’ Website Security
1) iThemes Security Pro
The security of the websites we manage on behalf of clients is underpinned by the reliable WordPress Security Plugin, iThemes Security Pro, designed by WordPress security experts.
The powerful tool boasts features such as malware and harmful files detection, lockouts of malicious IP addresses, who may be generating a lot of 404 errors by using a bot to scan your website for vulnerabilities, and limits on the number of failed login attempts permitted per user with WordPress brute force protection.
2) Nightly Website Backups
It would be a nightmare if you were to suddenly lose all your valuable website content. That’s why we make backups every night. In the highly unlikely event that anything should go wrong, we can restore clients’ websites with the previous night’s backups.
We provide further peace of mind with our state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform. It is incredibly resilient and therefore very rarely takes client websites offline.
3) SSL Certificates
Now an industry standard, businesses shouldn’t underestimate the value of the reassuring padlock next to the ‘https://’ bit of your website URL — a.k.a. an SSL certificate. Without an SSL Certificate, your website is likely to be labelled ‘Not Secure’. I don’t know about you, but that would deter me from browsing a website any further!
We can set up SSL certificates, enabling customers and website visitors to trust our clients’ brands online. You can read more about the benefits of SSL certificates, which include warranty protection for online transactions, increased online safety and higher conversion rates.
4) Strong Random Passwords
Gone are the days where you could use the same password again and again — despite it being easier to remember! We take the time and make the effort to use randomly generated passwords that are impossible to guess. Such passwords include a random combination of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers and symbols.
Password manager and digital wallet, LastPass, has a great password generator which you can find here.
5) Two Factor Authentication and Strong Logins
For an added layer of security, we don’t just have unique usernames and randomly generated strong passwords. We also either have codes emailed to us or temporary access codes generated in real-time by the Google Authenticator app on our phones. We need these codes, as well as usernames and passwords, each time we log in to work in the ‘back-end’ of a client’s website or add a blog post.
What’s more, the ‘nicknames’ we use, which appear as the ‘authors’ of blog posts, differ from our login usernames. This makes it harder for hackers to guess them and gain access to client websites.
Secure Your Customers Trust by Protecting Them on Your Website
If you would like to enhance your website security, or you have any concerns, contact us on 01484 290 100 and we’ll be happy to help!
