Online privacy and security are becoming increasingly more significant as the internet is used for more of our daily lives. You likely have some presence on the internet yourself (you’re reading this blog post, so chances are good) and you’ve probably taken at least a couple steps to ensure that you and your privacy are protected.
Your website should be just as protected. It likely contains sensitive data, cost a good amount of money, and has had a lot of your time and effort put into it! Below are three essential steps you must take to making sure your website stays as secure as possible.
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Find yourself some gamma radiation to create passwords stronger than The Hulk.
The first step to ensuring your website’s security is to make sure any passwords related to your Content Management System (CMS), Domain Registration, and Hosting are strong. Typically strong passwords contain lowercase and uppercase letters, and include at least one number or special character. There are services like Norton and LastPass who can help you come up with strong passwords.
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You always want the latest technology, so does your website.
Hacking websites take time, and the longer your website goes without an update, the more time hackers have to figure out how to exploit the code your websites use. Updating your CMS and the plugins your site use, as well as the software running on your server are key to preventing hackers from getting access to your website. Here at JUMP we primarily use the CMS platform Wordpress, and are always making sure to update whenever a new, stable, major release comes out.
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Avoid the (almost) $485 million dollar mistake.
In 1998, during the development of Toy Story 2, one of the animators at Pixar accidentally deleted the main folder for the entire film. They shut the servers down before the deletion process completed, but after bringing the servers back online, found they had lost nearly 90% of the film, with no backups to speak of. Fortunately for them, one of the technical directors had to work from home that that week, and had brought a copy of the film with her to work on. Toy Story went on to not only gross $485 million dollars, but is arguably one of Pixar’s best films and is loved by so many people… and we almost lost it.
We can do our best to keep our sites secure, and to avoid disasters, but we can only do so much. Even a large company like Pixar isn’t immune to potential problems. Backups provide an incredible safety net when issues do arise. If your website gets hacked, or if a server goes down, your backups will save you a world of headache. So please learn from Pixar’s mistake, and make sure you or your hosting company consistently backs up your website.
This is not an exhaustive list of all the steps you can take to help make your website more secure, but if you’re looking to get started and want to make sure you have the essentials down, start with these three things: make your passwords strong, stay updated, and backup like there’s no tomorrow.
