5 ways to protect your website against hackers

As we discussed recently: if you own a website, failing to take certain precautions can expose you to hacking risks. Both the smooth running of your site and your reputation could suffer as a result. This is especially true for e-commerce sites specialising in online sales, where financial transactions are a daily occurrence.

Today, the threat from hackers is growing. Hacking attempts are becoming increasingly automated and, as a result, are multiplying with greater ease.

Most of the time, a hack is not directly visible. It happens silently. Your site becomes a hacker's base of operations — they exploit its resources and use it to perpetuate their offences, in particular by infecting other websites.

The consequences for you: from a human perspective, your visitors will eventually complain of malfunctions on your site, or of excessive slowness, and will turn away from your business. In terms of SEO, Google may blacklist you — removing your site from its search results entirely.

There are several ways to prevent this worst-case scenario. Today we present 6 protective measures you can take.

Hide and protect your administration pages

Administration pages are a prime target for hackers as they allow access to your data and that of your clients.

These pages are particularly easy to find because they have a similar default name — especially on WordPress, Drupal, PrestaShop and equivalent CMS platforms.
Changing the name of the administration directory will make the hackers' task harder and may deter them. Along the same lines, use a personal, complex and unique password.

Use an SSL protocol

As we mentioned recently: an SSL protocol is a tool that encrypts your data. Think of it as a padlock on a door: when your data is transferred from your server to one of your visitors, the process is secured with an SSL certificate and no one can interfere.

Moreover, web browsers Chrome and Firefox are beginning to clearly indicate which sites use an SSL protocol and which do not. This can encourage visitors to prefer a protected site over a competitor that lacks SSL.

One final point worth noting: an SSL certificate will also benefit your organic search ranking whilst reinforcing your site's security and your visitors' trust.

Keep your site up to date

As we have discussed in more detail previously, installing your site's regular updates and those of its modules is essential.

Every week, security vulnerabilities are discovered. Updates are specifically designed to patch these vulnerabilities and thereby prevent hackers from exploiting them.

Ensuring these updates are applied as quickly as possible prevents your site from remaining exposed to certain vulnerabilities.

Avoid free plugins

On many CMS platforms, plugins are plentiful — both paid and free. They can add functionality to a site, automate tasks, simplify administration and make the overall experience more appealing for visitors.

It is therefore tempting to use them, especially when they are free.

However, it is important to understand that free plugins carry risks. Even if they are fully finalised and approved by the community at a given point in time (communities often test and comment on new releases to help them improve), this does not guarantee that they will remain relevant some time later.

Because they are free, these plugins are not necessarily maintained by their developer over the long term. As a result, they are not updated. This brings us back to the previous point: a lack of updates means surviving vulnerabilities and, ultimately, a possible incompatibility between the free plugin and the rest of the site, which will have been updated.

Take out a maintenance contract

To simplify your life and ensure regular updates, a maintenance contract with Http5000 means you no longer need to worry about this.
You can also ask us to provide your site with an SSL certificate. For any technical issue or specific question, contact Http5000 and let us explore together the solutions we can offer you.

These five approaches offer a few starting points for securing your site and keeping hackers at bay.
Many other measures can further strengthen your online protection. But these 5 elements alone are already overlooked by a great many site administrators. Relatively straightforward to implement, adopting these methods can only be beneficial — for you and for your visitors.