Internet is vast, empowering over billion of websites around the world. As safe as it could be for your website, it can pose some serious threats for it accordingly. If you craft a WordPress website to promote your business, then your online presence becomes your business identity. Since your website becomes a brand itself, you need to keep a thorough check that your online identity is safe and secure.

All that effort that you exert in designing a commendable website for your viewers, to establish your online presence, to gain network traffic and stabilize your business will go to waste if you fail to implement proper security measures.

The Dark Truth of the Internet

A few years back, the concept of cloud was not as common as it is now in the world of Information Technology. Since, the popularity of the CMS itself, WordPress, has rapidly grown over the passage of time; the risks associated with the web application has increased considerably.

For Internet is a dark place, much darker than the devil’s lair itself.

We will not get into the detailed depths of how dark the Internet is as it will take us off the topic… However, today, we will discuss how it reflects cybersecurity threats to WordPress, the best CMS in the world. WordPress is an open-source and free for all CMS market. It gives the liberty to third-party plugin and theme developers to sell their products through the WordPress repository. These third-party extensions and software are not as secure as their vendors might have marketed them. They create loopholes in your application resulting in external threats to easily enter and conduct cyber crimes.

Although, WordPress experts have contributed a lot to make the infrastructure as secure as possible for visitors, developers, and website owners as much as they can; Still multiple conducts such as cyber espionage, data theft, malware attacks and much more are observed each day. If your website becomes a security threat, most likely, your customers are going to be affected by it. This surely doesn’t mean that you should start distrusting third-party web applications; on the other hand, you can perform some privacy checks in order to protect visitors on your website.

8 Privacy Checklists That Can Secure your Visitors

When a visitor navigates to your web page, they aren’t as much aware of the risks they are vulnerable to as much as you do. To keep their identities private and to secure their information from being deteriorated, as a website owner, you maintain your customer’s trust.

Here is a list of 10 Privacy Checks that are mandatory to implement in order to create customer confidence while keeping your brand intact.

Commendable Hosting Service

A good hosting service ensures website security. In order to get a good hosting, I will personally recommend that you host your website in a cloud environment. Managed Cloud Hosting such as Cloudway enables you to launch your website on a cloud-based server. It offers you multiple features such as Vertical Scaling, Auto Backups, Cloning features, Real Time Monitoring and much more. All these services are available for both, server and application.

If you aren’t sure that your web host provider is a safe one, you can always check their reviews over the internet before shifting to a new one.

CDN Usage

As many may get a bit fussy, why should we use a CDN when we are already getting a good hosting provider; it is necessary that you should understand that CDN is not a hosting provider but a Content Delivery System. It positions itself on top of your host and helps display non-static content of your website to visitors.

SSL Certification

SSL Certification ensures a safe path for your website to be hosted over the Internet. SSL (Secure Socket Layer) is a certification that is normally provided as a free resource by your hosting provider. It further adds the validity of your website over the Internet. With SSL certification you can authorize your website for visitors as an authentic domain. You can get SSL certification for free through Let’s Encrypt, if your hosting provider doesn’t offer you such licensing.

DDoS Protection

If your website contains sensitive information or it performs multiple transactions each day, there is a high risk that it can be hacked. In order to keep your website secure from hackers, DDoS Protection is the best solution. At times, your website is hacked in order to reach to another website which is back linked with your domain. That’s where DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) comes into action. A number of companies with CDN services like Incapsula offer DDoS protection. It is good to perform a bit of a research before investing a lot of dollars on security.

Install a Firewall

This feature is mostly enabled for your website by your hosting provider. Although firewalls are the most safest method of prohibiting unwanted visitors on your website, it is still a risk as hackers have gained more commendable knowledge on how to reach them.

Config Server Services offers a free firewall for your WordPress website and you can easily get it from the Internet. If you are not sure how to install it, you can always ask your hosting provider to help you out with it.

Keep Plugins in Check

Vulnerabilities mostly enter your website through a third party inclusion to your web application. A wide number of plugins are offered by third-party vendors, hence, it is necessary that you keep a thorough check on which plugins you are downloading.

Always go through the plugin information whether it is coming from a reliable source.

Disable Error Reporting

Error reporting can significantly result in creating a leak hole for your website. Disable error reporting as it results in displaying your server path for everyone to observe. Most hackers, today, are quite well aware of it. They are waiting for an error report to generate, so it is necessary that you disable your front-end error reporting rather than giving away your data. The choice is yours.

In order to disable error reporting, you need to learn how to Debug your WordPress.

Clean Up Your Spam

Last but not the least; Spams can pose security threats to your website as well. Spams can significantly result in revealing your IP addresses and can do much more damage to your online presence. WordPress offers Akismet. It is a commendable plugin that can help you keep spam traffic off your website at all times.

Here are some of the tips and techniques that I learned while I was crafting my website on WordPress. If you find these options viable and informative, please leave us a feedback. If you have any other commendable techniques for securing your WordPress website, feel free to share your knowledge with us.

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