Security, Security, Security – You Can Never Have Too Much

Make sure you know about your own site's security policy.
Make sure you know about your own site’s security policy.

Security, you never realize how much you really should be thinking about it until your site is hacked. For business owners, let me caution you to not leave this most important aspect out of protecting your online presence to staff without some oversight.

Here’s what you as the business owner need to know about security.

  1. You need a back up and redundancy plan.
  2. You need to know what your webmaster is doing on security.
  3. You need to routinely monitor the Google Search Console for messages.
  4. Sometimes the Bing Search Console will notify you faster of a hack, so monitor there too.
  5. Look for weird URLs and strange activity in Google Analytics.
  6. Make sure you do regular back ups of your website files and keep several archives not just one.
  7. Back up your back up!
  8. If you use WordPress as the backbone for your site see below.
  9. Remain vigilant. If you have security plugins monitor the messages.

If you have WordPress…

I like WordFence as my security plugin. I am getting nice results and actionable message about access, updates to do to stay secure, and not too many messages that I get “security fatigue”.

I do use other plugins as well for WordPress. Below are the ones I will typically install for clients.

Login Lockdown
Locks out brute force attacks and bad passwords.

WordPress File Monitor
This plugin monitors the core files for changes and uploads.

Sucuri or WordFence
I have used this program but found that the number of messages was too overwhelming so at this time I am using WordFence instead. Just make sure you use something AND make sure to actually read the alerts!

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