Are you ready for the new year? In today’s Tech news Tuesday tip, we have five quick tips on how to keep your website secure in 2020.
Links in this episode: 5 Tips to Keep Your Website Secure in 2020
Sucuri Firewall (affiliate link)
Transcript
Welcome to the Get Digital Marketing Results podcast where we give you information and actionable tips to grow your organization.
Bob: Hi, I’m Bob Clark.
Donna: And I’m Donna Botti. We’re with Delos Inc and we make the web work for you. Are you ready for the new year? In today’s Tech News Tuesday tip, we have five quick tips on how to keep your website secure in 2020.
Your website is valuable and it may be a target for hackers, not necessarily because they’re targeting your individual website, but there are armies of bots out there trying to break into anything they can so they can use the resources for nefarious or illegal purposes that they don’t want tracked to them. So there’s a few basic steps you should make sure you’re covered.
Bob: That’s right Donna. The first thing to do is to use secure passwords. It should be no-brainer to say that you should use a secure password for access to your website.
But in 2019, still the top 5 most used passwords are:
- qwerty, (that’s those first set of letters there on your keyboard)
- password
- 111111
- And how about, 12345678
- And abc123
A secure password should be more complex. You can use a password management app to do this.
Also, make sure you know only the people that need access to your site, have access to your site. If you’ve set up multiple users don’t leave those old users, the people who left the company for example on there as well. Housekeeping is really important.
Donna: The second thing you can do is keep all of your software updated. Patching on a regular basis, and updating to the latest version. This is true for your computer and your website. If you’re using a WordPress website, update to the latest version and the latest version of any plugins you are using.
Those updates typically include feature enhancements, but also security fixes, so this is one of the best things that you can do.
Hackers automatically scan websites, thousands and thousands of them, looking for those that have identified vulnerabilities, in order to take advantage of them. It’s not usually some person sitting at a desk somewhere trying to break into your website, these are these automated bots that scan for vulnerabilities, common passwords, and a lot of times these can be found on out of date software.
The third thing that you can do is to use a web application firewall on your website. There’s a number of services out there that do this. Sucuri is one that we use on some of the sites we manage.
Essentially, a web application firewall sits in front of your website and rejects known bot traffic and denies attacks.
Bob: The fourth one, which one should be a basic best practice by now, is that you should have an SSL certificate on your website, the little lock icon on your site that indicates that traffic is encrypted between your website and the person viewing it. You can see that little lock to the left of the website address or the URL.
Donna: And finally, make sure you are doing regular backups to your website. Nothing is 100% secure, so if something does happen, the best thing you can do is to go back to an earlier, clean, backup version of your website, it just makes things so much simpler, if something should go wrong.
Bob: That’s it for today’s episode. You can find the link for the tips to secure your website and a transcript of today’s podcast at DelosInc.com/114.
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