For many small business owners, entrepreneurs and bloggers, the thought of having your website hacked is the stuff of nightmares. This happened to me earlier this year when the The Fabulous Times was hacked. The website went down and a virus was put on the site to redirect the traffic to a bogus website, utter nightmare! Long story short, I was able to get help to stop the virus and reclaim the website, lots of images and posts were lost and corrupted, but thankfully we got the website back up and running. Here are a few tips and ways to keep your website secure and stop this happening to you!
If you run a small business or if you’re a Blogger, it’s good to look at how you can protect yourself! There are such things nowadays such as cyber attacks and threats to our online security which can even stretch to social media. If your Instagram is your crowning glory, then maybe you’ll want to take steps to protect both your Social presence and your Blog. Here are some great ways to ensure you do this effectively and easily:
Tips To Keep Your Website Secure
- Secure passwords – it sounds simple but even today some people are still choosing very simple passwords that may be easy to guess by people.
- Don’t advertise your WordPress version! Therefore, if you have a theme with a login link, you should remove it. If you cannot remove it, consider changing the theme.
- Set up Google Authorship – this helps with stopping people getting into your system or trying to hack it!
- Get rid of hot linking – your hosting will receive additional load and your blog’s performance will be effected and this is direct copying of images from someone’s blog is called hotlinking.
- Look at your plug-ins! When you install a plugin, people may be able to access core files found in your WordPress installation. This is why you need to be cautious and be vigilant about the types that you use!
- Get a firewall – it will protect your blog against hacking and other security attempts, you should install one today if you haven’t already!
- Add password authentication to all files – if you want to keep hackers away they should not be able to break in through your login page. Add the password protection to your “WP-admin” folder. This will stop anyone from grabbing access! Except for you of course!
- For a more in depth way to secure your working systems, there is something known as IAM solutions, is an effective way to keep on top of our company’s security and outreach to be the best possible company.
- How roles are identified if you work with others (it may be that you have hired someone to undertake some admin tasks with you – we all need the help!)
- Authorising who can see your systems
- Protecting private data and passwords of email addresses for your newsletters or monthly roudups.
These are just a few ways to make sure your websites a lot more secure. With just a few steps you can make sure you don’t lose your valuable information, or worse, all your years worth of hard work that you’ve put into writing blogs, writing articles, uploading photos or even building your business. It doesn’t have to be really super tricky, the security ranges from low effort to maximum effort and you will see benefits in both. It’s definitely time as we approach 2020, to start looking towards a safer and healthier future for all. So let’s look to a brighter future…today!
Stay fabulous
Christine
