Hackers are becoming more creative than ever before. One thing remains the same: they love e-commerce sites.
Many of these sites store a wealth of valuable payment information that hackers would love to obtain. If they did manage to steal this information it could seriously damage your company’s finances as well as its reputation.
WordPress websites are often targets of attack because of their open source nature. As an owner of an e-commerce WordPress site, you need to take every step possible to protect your website, your information and the information of your customers. Here are a few tips for keeping your site safe starting today.
Staying Secure And Up-To-Date
Many e-commerce plugins are bundled together with premium themes. The overall goal is to provide as much functionality as possible to the user of the package. Thus, it makes sense to include these plugins with the themes.
Unfortunately, the creators of the themes and plugins sometimes push the importance of the plugin to the side. This is even more likely if they create additional packages in the future and forget entirely about the previous one. The author is responsible for updating the plugins and distributing the patch files, but they often fall short of this job. What does this mean for you?
It means it is very likely you are using code on your site that is not updated or secure. It is more easily exploitable by hackers. They will not hesitate to take advantage of this.
Avoiding this common problem is fairly simple. Only use themes or plugins provided by reputable theme developers. You can also rely on plugins found in the official WordPress repository. These are far more likely to have a proper update cycle in place.
Avoid Low-Budget Hosting
You can save a lot of money by using WordPress compared to hiring a professional web design team to build a website from scratch. Consider investing those savings into a high-quality hosting service. This is not necessarily important for those who just use WordPress as a blogging platform, but when it comes to e-commerce, security is paramount.
Shared hosting providers are considerably cheaper but at a larger risk. There are thousands of accounts or websites sharing a single server. A hacker can gain access to many other websites on that server through just a single exploitable site. Even if you are doing all you can to protect your WordPress site, a single weak link in the hosting chain could spell disaster.
Encourage Security Everywhere
Everyone who logs into your WordPress site will play a role in its security. This goes for the administrator as well as the customers. You can keep your site more secure by encouraging everyone to use protective measures wherever possible. One area you can easily control is password requirements.
For customers, you can require passwords that include numbers, letters, symbols, and different cases. Password requirements for administrator accounts should be even more severe. No dictionary words and mandatory symbols.
WordPress Security Plugins
Take advantage of the WordPress system by installing high-quality security plugins. There are quite a few free and premium plugins you can use to enhance the security of your e-commerce site. As with any plugin, you should always verify the integrity of the code and only use plugins that are regularly updated.
Most security plugins work by scanning your installation, plugins, and various files for any signs of malicious activity. They may be designed to spot signs of some of the more commonly known attacks. They may also impose additional restrictions that improve security such as reducing the number of allowed login attempts or blocking certain IP addresses.
Don’t Forget The Basics
All of the basic tips for keeping a website safe will apply to WordPress as well. For example, only use secure connections, avoid public WiFi when logging in, train any employees in proper security measures, avoid storing sensitive information, and have multiple layers of security. Use these pointers in addition to WordPress-specific security measures to keep your website as safe as possible.
How You Can Keep Your WordPress E-commerce Site Secure originally appeared on Custom WordPress Design | Website Maintenance & Security | SEO on June 1, 2016.
