Your website is an investment in your business and a vital tool for your customers. In order to protect this valuable asset, I recommend the following five key features to keep your website active and accessible.
Keep Your Domain Private
Domain Privacy protects your personal details from being publicly available in the Whois database and hides the contact information such as your name and organization, address, phone, email address, etc. related to your domain name. It is strongly recommended to activate the service in order to avoid identity theft and spam. Source: https://www.siteground.com
Use reCAPTCHA on Your Forms
reCAPTCHA is a free service from Google that helps protect websites from spam and abuse. A “CAPTCHA” is a turing test to tell human and bots apart. It is easy for humans to solve, but hard for “bots” and other malicious software to figure out. By adding reCAPTCHA to a site, you can block automated software while helping your welcome users to enter with ease. Source: https://support.google.com
Update Website & Security Software Regularly
Updates are vital to the health and security of your website. If your site’s software or applications are not up-to-date, your site is not secure. Take all software and plugin update requests seriously. Updates often contain security enhancements and vulnerability repairs. Check your website for updates or add an update notification plugin. Source: www.computer.org
Some website platforms offer automatic software and security updates. Sometimes the software applications or plugins on your site can conflict with each other during the automatic update. Unfortunately, if this happens the website can crash without notification. Manual updates will inform you immediately if there is a conflict. This helps prevent the website from crashing. This may be something to consider when selecting the automatic update option. Dean
Block Comment Spam
If you don’t want comments, the easiest thing to do is to disable them. If you want to allow comments, then we suggest that you manually approve of them before you allow them to be published. You may also want to see if you have the option to turn off anonymous comments; or if you run a community website, only allow members to comment. Frequent monitoring is necessary.
Use HTTPS & SSL Certification
To keep your website safe, you need a secure URL. HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is a protocol used to provide security over the Internet. HTTPS prevents interceptions and interruptions from occurring while the content is in transit. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is another necessary site protocol. This transfers visitor’s personal information between the website and your database. SSL encrypts information to prevent it from others reading it while in transit. It denies those without proper authority the ability to access the data, as well. Source: www.computer.org
Please be aware: In my experience, Google and other major search engines may block websites without SSL certification. Dean
FOR MORE INFORMATION REGARDING YOUR WEBSITE SECURITY OR MONTHLY MAINTENANCE PLEASE CONTACT DEAN
