8 Website Security Best Practices for Your Web Development Project

Cybersecurity attacks occur every day. As of May, there have already been over 35 billion global data breaches and cyber attacks. Security breaches can severely impact your business, from legal ramifications to lost revenue and a damaged reputation.

When you take steps to improve your site’s security, you’re not only protecting your business and your staff, you’re looking out for your customers and enhancing your credibility in the eyes of stakeholders and partners.

So, how can you best protect your site from data security breaches and malicious activity?

1. Identify common threats
2. Proactively secure your website
3. Know how to properly respond to data breaches

Common cybersecurity threats

Website security threats come in many forms. From phishing attacks to code injections, there are many opportunities for harm. Here are some of the most common web security threats:

• Broken authentication: A data breach that results from compromised login-based access. This could be a result of credential stuffing, password spraying, phishing attacks and other methods.
• Distributed denial of service (DDoS): DDoS attacks aim to make a website unavailable to general users by overwhelming the site’s web server with requests. This can distract security systems and allow even more security attacks to occur.
• Malware: Malware is a broad term that refers to any type of malicious software that is used to steal sensitive data, disrupt services or damage a network in any way. Some types of malware include ransomware, worms, spyware, bots and viruses.
• Cross-site scripting (XSS): XSS attacks involve a malicious party tricking a browser into injecting scripts into a site’s code. This code gives malicious parties unauthorized access to control the website, which could result in malware being installed, personal data being exported and more.
• Scripted query language (SQL) and code injections: One of the most common web attacks in the past decade, SQL injections allow attackers to compromise a web server’s databases. This gives malicious parties access to forms, cookies, posts and other data.

Now that you’ve been reminded of the many ways your site’s security can be compromised (sorry about that), let’s review your options for securing and protecting your website and data.

The best way to secure and protect your website

From banking websites to ecommerce stores, every site has data that needs to be secure and protected. If you’re hoping to keep your site secure, you need to be setting up layers of data protection across various parts of your site and network. Here are some best practices for keeping your website secure:

1. Create strong passwords

Perhaps the most basic security tip there is is to create strong, complex passwords. Ensure you’re using a combination of numbers, letters, cases and symbols and avoid reusing the same password multiple times. Be sure that a password is required any time someone wants to access the backend of your website or any related applications or software systems. An even better way to secure your site is to require multi-factor authentication!

2. SSL/TLS certificates

Establishing an SSL (secure sockets layer) certificate is an extremely important part of creating a secure website. SSL certificates are a data security standard now, and many users will quickly move on from your site if it’s flagged as not secure.  This certificate verifies your site’s identity and aids in data protection, which offers many benefits to you and your users:

• Data encryption
• Provides proof that your site is legitimate and secure
• Improves SEO

3. Frequent site backups and audits

Another great way to protect your site’s security is to set up automatic backups for important files, critical data and content. This will create a copy of your site so that all of your hard work can be restored if something were to go wrong, be it a server crash or hacker.

Similarly, it’s important to have someone on staff or a trusted partner doing frequent audits of your site. Regularly checking in on your data access control privileges, recent sign-ins, site settings and more can unearth problems or gaps early on, before there’s a problem.

4. Monitor your plugins and integrations

Your site is only as secure as your most vulnerable plugin or integration. If you are using any software, content management systems or plugins on your site, you need to ensure you are vetting the security of these applications as well as enabling security alerts.

Without taking steps to secure all of your integrations and applications, you’re putting your site at risk. Find out which of the following apply to you, and what steps have been taken to vet and secure each:

• Content management systems: WordPress, Shopify, Drupal, etc.
• SEO plugins
• Ecommerce integrations for inventory, payment, customer data and order management
• Social media plugins
• Analytics plugins
• Audio/video integrations
• Be sure to complete a full audit of your site for a full picture of your site’s integrations and applications.

5. Store as little as possible

In an ideal world, your web server isn’t storing anything in the database that isn’t public information. If your web server is strictly marketing information, your liability decreases significantly.

Without stored financial information, healthcare information or other business or personally identifiable information, the primary risk of a security breach is vandalism. Not great, but certainly not the worst that could happen.

Of course, this may be more difficult to control depending on the type of business and website you’re managing. Fortunately, most ecommerce, healthcare and other enterprises that are responsible for collecting or storing a lot of personal information should have 3rd party systems in place that are secure and capable of safeguarding sensitive information.

6. Use a web application firewall (WAF)

Web application firewalls are security tools that protect your web applications from the rest of the internet. WAFs filter and monitor traffic to prevent security breaches and attacks. A WAF is especially helpful for warding off things like cross-site scripting, SQL injection, DDoS and file inclusion, but may not protect against network-layer attacks.

7. Audit your organization’s security framework

The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Cybersecurity Framework details six functions that support data security management for organizations of all sizes. While not very technical, this list is a good place to start if you’re sniffing out potential gaps in your current web security solutions. The six functions include:

• Govern: Your risk management strategy, expectations and policies, including how these are established, communicated and regularly monitored.
• Identify: How your cybersecurity risks are understood. This involves identifying all related assets (data, hardware, software, systems, etc.) that are related to your site security and identifying improvement opportunities.
• Protect: You’re actively supporting and safeguarding your assets from cybersecurity threats. This includes security features of your hardware, software, platforms and more, as well as access control at your organization, general awareness and training on data security, etc.
• Detect: You are able to find and analyze possible breaches and security attacks. This includes timely discovery and analysis of potential threats or gaps in your site’s security measures.
• Respond: You take action once a breach or attack has been detected, including incident analysis, mitigation, reporting and communication.
• Recover: Your assets and operations affected by a cybersecurity incident are restored. This includes timely restoration of normal operations to mitigate negative effects.

8. Work with a reliable hosting partner

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the amount of steps you need to take to keep your site secure, I have some good news. While it is important to have a solid security policy in place within your organization, a good hosting partner will also manage many of these steps for you.

Ensuring your site is secure is also highly dependent on your web server. A website hosting provider maintains the server for you and often supports your site in other ways. For example, Orbit’s managed hosting services include:

• Software maintenance and upgrades
• Performance optimization
• Uptime monitoring
• Data loss prevention
• Form monitoring and testing
• Environment hardware maintenance and upgrades
• Daily data backup service
• Data management
• Plugin updates
• CMS updates

To summarize, a good hosting provider will support your site’s security as well as provide you with good uptime, fast load times, frequent updates and careful monitoring.

Responding to malicious activity

If malicious activity is detected or a security breach does occur, it’s important to have a plan in place to secure and recover any data and identify what went wrong. This can be broken down into a few different steps:

1. Contain: If possible, isolate any impacted systems quickly. Containing the breach or activity may help prevent further damage.
2. Assess: Investigate what occurred and how it occurred. Is the problem a result of broken authentication, DDoS, malware, a phishing attack or some other method? What is the scope of the problem?
3. Communicate: Ensure you are providing timely communication to all parties involved or impacted, be it customers, stakeholders, employees or regulatory compliance officials.
4. Recover: Do what you can to remedy the situation by removing the malicious software, scripts or codes. Recover your saved data from any backup drives as soon as any malicious elements have been removed.
5. Review: Once the incident has been remedied, conduct a thorough investigation into what occurred, as well as any gaps in your security framework, and put together a plan to optimize your systems moving forward.

Website security impacts everyone

As web content creators, web developers, web hosts and users of the World Wide Web, it’s vital that we take the necessary steps to protect our digital information. This means educating ourselves and our teams on potential threats, web security best practices and how to effectively respond to security threats or malicious activity.

It is a full-time job maintaining a secure, high-performing website. You need an experienced partner that utilizes industry-standard tools, software and quality hosting services. With Orbit Media, you know your site is in good hands. From web design and development to web hosting needs, we have got you covered.

Tell us how we can support you.