The Marketers’ Guide to Website Security

Every business needs a website, whether focusing on eCommerce or primarily doing business on the high street. A good Shopify store, a strong landing page, an optimised collection of products – these are all effective selling and marketing tools for businesses of all forms. Whatever platform or content delivery network (CDN) you use, website security cannot be ignored. 

With millions of cyber security breaches every year, knowing how to make a website secure is essential information for every business owner. In this blog, we’re going to offer insights into the cyber security measures we consider necessary as performance digital marketers, so you can set up the best defenses possible. 

Encrypting the website

Encrypting website data is vital to ensuring user security. Encrypting is essentially scrambling the data – turning plaintext into ciphertext – that’s exchanged between users’ browsers and the website itself. This essentially makes it unreadable to eavesdroppers, ensuring sensitive information like login details and credit card details remains secure. It’s a vital element of how to create a secure website, aligning with GDPR. 

Update your firewalls

Firewalls are an appropriately load-bearing pillar of website security. They’re essentially pieces of software or hardware that limit the traffic or data that makes its way into a network. You can protect your website from malware and dangerous invaders with strong, up-to-date firewalls – professional cyber criminals might be adept in penetrating older ones.

Complex passwords & regular updates

On the individual level, you can do a website security check by ensuring everyone on your team has an appropriately complex password. Anything super common is leaving the door open to criminals! These should be regularly updated, as you might always have people working to bypass them.

Multi-factor authentication

Multi-factor authentication is great for stacking with complex passwords, ensuring personnel are authorised with additional layers of security. This could mean a text message to a phone, an email authentication or anything similar. 

Regular data backups

Back your data up! This means finding new digital or physical locations for website information to be stored, other than within the primary network. This ensures that you can recover your site in the case of a breach or another data emergency. 

Check website security often

You should enact security audits with a proper website security checker often. Setting up the architecture of security once generally isn’t going to be enough to keep things safe from opportunists forever – it’s an ongoing process that requires consistent attention and vigilance. 

Create a culture of website security

One of the most important things is keeping your staff aware and trained in terms of the importance of website security. This means: 

• Leading by example with your own security
• Clearly communicating in-house policies 
• Creating a simple reporting structure

Everyone on the team should be on the same page, with the same level of understanding.

If you don’t know where to start with website security, don’t be afraid to seek help! By outsourcing security to a team like our performance marketing agency, you can ensure it fits seamlessly into a wider digital strategy, run by experts. For more insights into the nature of digital operations, visit our blog today!