Is your website secure?
Written by Adrian Law on
With so much of our time spent on the internet, your business’s online presence has never been more important than ever. But an easily overlooked aspect of building a website is security. Security may be a buzzword that’s commonly thrown around but that doesn’t mean it has to be complicated. Here’s 3 simple issues you can check for, and some possible solutions.
1. Are you using HTTPS?
One of the easiest issues to detect is a website’s use of HTTPS, a secure communication, rather than HTTP. Modern web browsers make this easily visible to users. For example, both Google Chrome and Firefox will display a “Not Secure” message for sites that are not fully secured. This can happen even if the URL starts with “https”! This can be due to a variety of reasons – the usual cause is a lack of an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate, or less often, if the HTTPS website tries to reach a non-HTTPS resource such as an image.
Fortunately, these issues are often quite easy to solve. The majority of website builders such as Squarespace and Wix automatically enable SSL without any action required. WordPress, a widely used tool for building websites, can also have this functionality although the process can be less straightforward depending on where the site is hosted. WordPress plugins can also make the process of enabling HTTPS on all web links and images more automatic.
2. Are you up to date?
This point is more targeted to the WordPress users, as the other online platforms mentioned generally require less or no user updating. But both the WordPress software and the many plugins that are available receive security updates. WordPress’s popularity makes it a target for breaches, so checking your site’s security should be high on your to-do list.
The solution here is easily accessible from your WordPress dashboard, as there are ways to have both WordPress and your plugins update automatically. Since version 3.7 of WordPress, released in 2013, the core software automatically updates, for one less update to worry about. We recommend not disabling this feature unless working with older plugins or themes that may not work with newer versions – although in that case we would suggesting finding more recent plugins! Plugins and themes do not update by default, but there are tools that can automate this too. Do consider that one reason to not automatically update the theme is that any custom changes may be erased, so be sure to back up before updating! Leading us to our third point:
3. Are you backed up?
Regardless of what platform you’re using, backups are a crucial part of online security. Imagine losing potential clients because they couldn’t access your website, if your content didn’t display correctly or the page didn’t load at all. Now imagine being able to restore any lost content within hours or minutes. A working backup solution is your safety net in today’s online environment, so take a moment to review what’s in place.
Backup will look different for you depending on how your website is built, and maybe a full site restore isn’t possible with some providers. But remember that the main goal is to be able to restore as much data as possible, with as little downtime as possible, in the unlikely event of a data breach or data loss. This can even include user error, which can happen to anyone! If you’re unsure where to start, try keeping the text and images on your website in a second location, so that you can restore the content if needed. If you have access to the website files, such as with a WordPress installation, there are tools available to automatically and periodically back up your data, more convenient than manually creating copies.
We hope you’ve now kept your website a few steps ahead in security, if you didn’t already have these measures in place. Lotus Network Solutions also offers website and domain management services, and if you’d like us to work with you in any area, please contact us, or find out about the other services we offer.