How To Keep Your E-commerce Site Secure
Every day, websites are attacked an average of 58 times, according to a study by SiteLock in 2018. While every website owner should worry about keeping their site secure, e-commerce site owners should be especially careful.
E-Commerce site owners have a duty to protect their customer’s personal information like credit card data, addresses, and email address. Keeping your site secure is vital to keep the trust of your customers. If you get hacked, you might also get blacklisted, which means you will lose traffic rapidly, and it might take a few days or more to get your site back off the blacklist.
To keep your site up and running as much as possible, here are a few steps you should follow to keep your e-commerce site secure.
1. Choose A Secure E-Commerce Web Host
Keeping your site secure starts from the beginning and in which web host you select. Security should be the top priority. You want to look for a web host that has a high uptime guarantee, RAID data protection which will create multiple backup copies of your website in numerous places, and has responsive customer service in case something does go wrong.
2. Use HTTPS
Another simple way to reduce the risk of online frauds is switching your website to HTTPS. In order to do so, you must have an SSL certificate, which you can purchase from a trusted SSL vendor or your hosting company.
By installing it, it tells Google that your site is secure, and it tends to give your website a higher SERP ranking, which will hopefully lead to more visitors to your site. HTTPS also serves as a server link between your visitor’s browsers and your servers, helping to keep their private information safe from hackers.
3. Select A Secure E-Commerce Platform
Now that you have your web host, you need to decide what platform you want to power your e-commerce website. You should consider a variety of features like support, performance, and features. Security should be the aspect you examine most carefully, because if the platform isn’t secure, then the other elements don’t matter. You should also ensure that your e-commerce platform uses safe payment gateways and keeps the methods of keeping the site secure up-to-date.
There are many different e-commerce platforms to choose from, including Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify, Prestashop, and many more.
4. Stronger Passwords
Once hackers have access to user login information, they can infiltrate easily and do a lot of harm. Therefore, you, as the site owner, should take steps to ensure that your customers are doing their part to keep their information safe and secure. You can require that customers use passwords that are eight characters or more, have an upper and a lowercase letter, a number, and a symbol.
5. Don’t Store Sensitive Data
On your end, you should ensure that you aren’t storing sensitive data like credit card numbers on your website. Keeping confidential information stored on your website is often a bad idea because if your site is hacked and the information is stolen, you might lose the trust and business of your customers.
Consider using tokenization, which generates random numbers to take the place of customer information. This method can also cut down on credit card fraud.
6. Update Your Website
If hackers do find a way to infiltrate a vulnerability, developers will release new software updates that solve the problem. One of the easiest ways for hackers to infiltrate your website is through out-dated plug-ins, themes, and software. Ensure that you don’t have any old plug-ins on your website that you aren’t using anymore, which could also be a way that your website is being hacked.
7. Regularly Backup Your Website
You should backup your e-commerce website frequently. If something does go wrong and you are hacked, then you can fall back on the backup to restore your site. When choosing a hosting provider, make sure that they have an automatic backup service that you can rely on if you do forget to manually backup your data.
8. Run Vulnerability Tests
One simple act you should perform on a regular schedule is run vulnerability tests. That way, you can quickly see what problems or vulnerabilities are on your website. If you have chosen a secure e-commerce platform, they should provide you with tools that help you to scan for vulnerabilities. You should be scanning not only your own website but also the network so you can be aware of any problems that need to be resolved.
9. Have a PCI DSS Compliant Website
As the owner of your site, another thing you should check is to make sure that your site is PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliant. This is the information security standard that organizations should follow when they are handling branded credit cards from the top card schemes. PCI DSS compliance was created to help increase the protections and controls surrounding the credit card data to reduce the chances of fraud.
10. Use CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A content delivery network is a group of servers that are spread out geographically. This group of servers works together to deliver Internet content faster. It stores copies of your content and also learns how to identify malware. CDNs can help to block DDoS attacks.
When creating your e-commerce site, make sure to follow these sites to keep your e-commerce site as safe and secure as possible.
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