With WordPress market share today being roughly 64%, it is important to keep your WordPress website secure regardless of your business.
Here are the reasons why!
- Data protection: Every website holds sensitive information. Either it being payment details, customer information or other business content. Keeping this information safe is vital in order to prevent breaches and to safeguard your business reputation. Legal repercussions can be severe in case of a data breach.
- Customer trust: A secure website builds trust with your visitors and customers. When people feel their data is protected, they are more likely to engage with your site and make purchases.
- Bad actors: Security breaches, malware, or hacks can cause your website to be taken down. In turn disrupting business operations and harming your online presence and revenue.
- Legal liabilities: Security issues and information breaches can result in legal liabilities, including fines and lawsuits up to millions if not billions of USD, particularly if customer data is compromised.
- SEO: Search engines like Google prioritise secure websites in their rankings. A secure site with an SSL certificate and robust security measures can improve your search engine visibility.
So what should you do to you many ask?
Well, here’s how to ensure your WordPress websites stays safe and secure!
- Keep your website up to date: Keeping everything up to date is very important, when it comes to WordPress website. Make sure your plugins, theme and WordPress core are kept up to date and check for available updates regularly. Just make sure to back up your site before making any changes in case something goes wrong.
- Password, password password: There’s been many tales how people have had their information stolen, only to realise it was due to their poor choice of passwords. Making sure you and your customers use a strong password can can greatly increase the odds of keeping your website and data safe.
- 2FA what is it: Two-Factor authentication is an extra layer of protection on-top of your regular password when logging into your website. It will help to ensure no-one except yourself can log into your website even if your password and username have been leaked somehow.
- Keep fresh backups: Having fresh backups are crucial when something has gone wrong or your website has been hacked. Being able to quickly restore a previous version of your site can reduce the impact on your business.
- WAF: WAF or Web Application Firewall is a website firewall that will help to block all kinds of malicious traffic and scripts. One of the most used firewall applications for WordPress is WordFence which can be set up to block bots that try to use brute force techniques to guess usernames and passwords.
