As an online business owner, you need to make safety one of your top priorities. Hackers are more likely to target small online businesses since these businesses cannot afford extensive cybersecurity solutions.
There are steps you can take to make your website safer, protect your customers’ data, and educate your visitors about online safety. This is especially important for customers who aren’t tech-savvy, such as senior citizens.
Set Up Best Practices And Stick To Them
You need to have a clearly defined safety policy that includes a set of best practices. These are some of the practices you should think about adopting:
- Determine who needs to access sensitive data and where this data will be stored.
- Enforce strong password policies for employees and visitors. Make sure passwords are changed regularly.
- Think about using two-factor authentication.
- Reset all passwords if you suspect that a security breach occurred.
- Don’t use form auto-fill if you sell products online.
Updates
Updates typically become available when a flaw is found with a platform, a script, or an app. Some updates will be installed automatically, but you should regularly check for updates and install them.
Keep Your Backend Safe
There are a few things you can do to protect your backend from attacks:
- Hackers often target admin directories. Make these directories hard to find and change the default passwords.
- You can make your server safer with a Web application firewall.
- There are other free or affordable security applications that you can install on your server.
- Add a Content Security Policy to the headers of your pages. This element will tell browsers not to execute scripts from other domain names. Hackers might try to add malicious code to your pages to execute harmful scripts, but a CSP will tell browsers not to execute these scripts.
Use An SSL Certificate
You can easily obtain an SSL certificate and install it on your server. This certificate will encrypt all the data requested by visitors as well as the data shared with your server.
Once your SSL certificate is installed, visitors will see a padlock icon next to your URL. Depending on the certificate you install, there might also be a green section next to your site name.
An SSL certificate is an important feature since it prevents hackers from intercepting sensitive data when visitors fill out forms or make an online purchase. It also protects their privacy.
The padlock icon, HTTPS in the URL and the green section in your URLs are signs that Internet users know they should look for.
Transparency Is Important
Internet users care about security and particularly seniors need reassuring that they’re safe online. In fact, 85 percent of US Internet users said they wouldn’t visit a website if their browser told them it wasn’t secure. Some users will know they should look for a padlock icon, but others such as senior users won’t know what to look for. This is why you need to talk to your customers about the steps you are taking to protect their data.
If a breach occurs, you need to talk about what happened and the measures you took to prevent more incidents.
Security should be a priority if you own an online business. Take security in your own hands and remember that transparency is key to earning the trust of your customers.
Author, Jenny Holt, is a former HR executive turned freelance writer, who now spends more time with her young family and aging, but ever eager Labrador, Rover.
