7 Security Tips to Protect your eCommerce Site Against Cyber Threats
The potential of online shopping has snowballed over the years and it’s not going to slow down anytime soon. It’s easier to imagine a world where everything is done online or virtually. It was revolutionary for me when I was able to pay for my Cox bundles bill online. Things have advanced much more particularly because of COVID!
Unfortunately, everything good comes with a price. In a connected world such as ours, cyber-attacks are mainstream. A report by Succuri says that the number of sites getting compromised each year is increasing. They predicted that by the end of the year 2020, the damage related to cybercrimes may hit $6 trillion. Every website, especially eCommerce sites, is prey to hackers because they store sensitive user information.
Therefore, every eCommerce startup must ask themselves if their website secure enough? It will become hard to build a reputation if your site becomes a victim of a breach before even people know you! This calls for boosting your site’s security. Start with these strategies to keep hackers at bay:
1: Choose the Right Hosting Service
Among the first line of defense for securing your eCommerce website is buying the right web host. Hosting for a personal blog is different from hosting for an eCommerce website. Instead of choosing shared hosting, you are better off with dedicated hosting because it’s exclusively yours! It can add an additional layer of protection to your website and help you control the flow of web traffic as it increases over time.
2: Install an SSL Certification
The internet uses HTTP protocol to transfer information from the browser of the user to a hosting server. By nature, HTTP is not secure for transferring information. It does not have any type of encryption for the data that is being transferred.
This means the data of your users is at the mercy of hackers. They could easily hack passwords, addresses, and credit card numbers and you won’t even realize.
There is a solution to this.The secure socket layer encrypts all communication happening between the user of the browser and the site. No one within the network traffic can snoop on this information. Hosting providers sell SSL certificates as well. Once you have bought the domain and hosting for your e-commerce site, buy this certificate too for making your website secure on the spot!
3: Request Strong Passwords from Your Users
This cannot be stressed enough. Some websites don’t have control over what passwords a user chooses. If the passwords are weak, trained hackers can guess them right away and invade your website, which was otherwise secure.
This problem is real. To tackle them, encourage users to choose sophisticated passwords that are a combination of special characters, numbers, and alphabets. Also, remind your website users to change their passwords after every 3 months.
4: Track User Activity and Set Alerts
Tracking user activity is very important on any website for analyzing their behavior. For security purposes, there is no harm in setting up tracking on specific sections or user actions. For instance, you should be tracking who attempts to log in or sign up to your eCommerce platform. Check how frequent their trials are and track their IP address. This will help you detect attacks beforehand.
Ideally, set alerts so that whenever a suspicious activity takes place, you get notified right away and you can take immediate action.
5: Don’t Store Sensitive User Information
E-commerce websites should be very careful in collecting and storing information. Only gather and keep the information necessary for current use.
Use an encrypted checkout process to ensure that your own servers never access the customer’s card details when processing their credit cards. This is extremely important. PCI Security Standard Council can penalize eCommerce stores if they violate this security rule.
6: Perform Regular Security Audits
It is always a healthy practice to conduct routine security audits on your e-commerce website. Security audits are quite beneficial in preserving the integrity of your website. They also help determine the likelihood of gaining malicious or unauthorized access to an online store.
During an audit, you change passwords to all critical points, update plugins and software, eliminate old user accounts and delete unnecessary data from the server.
7: Create a Backup of Your Database
It’s absolutely necessary to invest time in creating a backup strategy. Backups let you keep copies of important data in case your eCommerce application gives up on you or there is something wrong with the main server.
Turn on automated online backups so that this process is done on autopilot. In addition to that, it’s recommended to have an offline backup as well. In case online backups are unavailable, at least you can minimize the downtime by accessing the local offline backup.
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