Secure your website with these checks

One of the hottest new trends in website development is ensuring that your website is safe from hackers. Malware and malicious scripts can quickly bring down a website, which isn’t just frustrating both for you and your prospective customers, but it can seriously dent your profits.

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Fortunately, increasing numbers of website owners are realising the importance of ensuring that their websites remain secure at all times. According to a recent article in Wired, the end of January 2017 marked the moment when visitors to encrypted websites surpassed the number of visitors to unencrypted sites for the first time.

To ensure that your site remains secure at all times, make sure that you instigate the following checks:

Use SSL certification

SSL, also known as Secure Sockets Layer, guarantees a secure connection, providing a visual reference of a padlock in the web browser address bar. SSL shows that traffic to and from your web server is securely encrypted, which prevents hackers from accessing information.

Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, addresses should be updated to become HTTPS, where the ‘S’ stands for ‘secure’. Failing to take advantage of the secure protocols could seriously harm your business, so if you’re not sure how to go about this, call in some professional assistance. Whether you are in search of web design in Peterborough or Paddington, companies such as www.routetoweb.co.uk can ensure that your website is fitted with high-level security that dramatically lessens your website’s likelihood of being hacked.

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Keep an eye on data output

JavaScript is increasingly being used by hackers as a way of placing malicious code onto your site, with the potential to capture data from your visitors. Known as XSS attacks, or cross-site scripting, you need to check that your web development team has a method for minimising this type of attack on your data.

Tidy up error messages

Error messages allow developers to assess where problems lie with a website’s coding, but failing to remove them when the website goes live could compromise your site’s data. Make sure that any error messages don’t give away important details about your website that hackers could use to their advantage.

Store passwords as ‘salted hash’

Hashing a password creates an encrypted fixed-length password from a variable length one, using a generated ‘salt’ value, which is completely random, and therefore secure.

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