How Can I Make Sure My Business Website is Secure?

With data security breaches costing UK businesses tens of millions of pounds each year, combined with an ever-increasing amount of business being driven through a company’s web presence, securing your business website is, and will continue to be, incredibly important.

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Even the smallest business will want to maximise website uptime, and with web applications gaining popularity, web site breaches can have much farther reaching consequences than mere web presence.

So the question, then, is simple: how can a business secure its website?

Secure all the Access Points

When you install a security system in a house, you focus on the doors and windows – the access points. The same principal applies to web sites. Start by securing your access points. This has two sides: admin access and file uploads.

File uploads are awkward. They are often necessary, but any uploaded file can be infected, intentionally or unintentionally, with malicious code. The key, then, is to only allow file uploads when absolutely necessary, to limit the file formats that can be uploaded, and to aggressively quarantine and scan uploaded files.

The second common access points are login pages, especially administrator and employee access pages. As a starting point, make sure that when promoting your business through a London SEO agency such as https://www.elevateuk.com/seo-services/ you don’t give them any links directly to access pages. More important, though, is using the robots.txt file to hide these pages from search engines.

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Instil Confidence in Customers

There are some things you can do to secure your website that are very visible to customers, and can increase their confidence with you as a provider.

First, switch your hosting to SSL hosting, which encrypts all traffic to and from your site. This means no one can eavesdrop on communication, or if they do, that they can’t interpret the information.

Second, consider placing some trust seals on your website. While they do not increase security per se, they have a marked impact on visitor confidence, especially if you take payment details through your site.

Keep up to Date

Lastly, keep all the software you use on any networked device up to date. New threats are discovered daily, and security fixes come out equally quickly. Do not let yourself get caught in a situation you could have prevented by not allowing an automatic update to finish.