Best Practise Security Tips For Your E-Commerce Website
Is your E-Commerce website secure from hackers?
When a spam or hack attack hits an e-commerce website, the monitory loss might be small but the business can certainly lose its market position and its customer’s trust.
This is a very serious setback and every ecommerce business owner must be prepared with the adequate tools to prevent such attacks. Poor web server security can lead to vulnerable access to your customer’s data and in turn a severe business loss. Hosting your business website with renowned service providers is not enough, you need to ensure your own safety by adding additional security layers around your website. If you are using a dedicated server, then you should appoint a web master with security expertise.
Here are some simple questions that you should ask your service provider or your webmaster to check the level of current security implemented for your online business. Positive answers to these questions will ensure the right level of security and you can concentrate on the business rather than infrastructure issues.
Administrative Access – Relevant questions to ask:
-
Is the username and password strong enough?
-
Is the password changed on regular basis?
-
How many people have access to this username and password?
Credentials for administrative access for your website are very important. Especially the password which must be strong enough so that hackers can’t guess it easily. If someone gets access to the administrative panel, they can create havoc for your ecommerce business.
Your username and password should be between 8 to 12 characters and contain numbers, alphabets and special characters. Automatic password generator programs are also helpful in many conditions as they generate passwords that are nearly impossible to guess.
A bad practice is to use the same password over a long period of time. There should be specific time periods when you should change your password. Also, providing admin access to everyone is certainly not a good idea, only the webmaster and key business stakeholders should know the admin username and password.
Customer Data – You can get the status of customer data on your server by asking following questions:
-
What data is captured from site visitors?
-
How is the stored data utilized for running the business?
-
Is the data encrypted and where it is stored on the server?
Hackers are mainly interested in stealing customer data from your website, which they can sell to other companies. Minimizing the data storage on your server is one solution to reduce the possibility of a data breach. Infact you do not need to store all the data on your server, your business can run smoothly without storing all customer’s data directly on the server. You can take a backup of your databases and save it somewhere else. For example you do not need to store any financial transactions data as your payment gateway saves all this information for you.
SSL Certification:
-
Which SSL certificate is installed on the website?
-
How many and which pages are served through SSL?
Having SSL installed on your ecommerce system is extremely necessary if you are connecting to a payment gateway. Selecting trusted SSL brand and not depending on the service ’certificate’ is the best way. Your visitors will feel safe when they see the seal of a popular and most effective SSL provider on your website. Pages served through an SSL layer are limited to payment gateway pages however if you can apply SSL to other pages then it might prove very effective.
You can thus ensure the security status of your ecommerce website by asking these questions and finding their real answers.
If you are interested in getting more security techniques or information related to e-commerce website development please get in touch.
Read More On Digital Doughnut