WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin to sell products and services. You can sell digital and physical products, manage inventory and shipping, take secure payments, and sort taxes automatically. The fact that people will be using their credit card information to buy from your website or app, makes even more important to secure them.
The next security tips will help you to avoid a possible security issue, attack or error that could prove fatal for your business.
Table of contents
First, you need to focus on a general point, i.e.: the whole WordPress. Here are a few key points to consider.
Security Tips
Functional Isolation
Logical separation of applications into separate accounts with their own access will confine a compromise to that one account and reduce damage.
Limit access
Reduce the number of people who have administrative access to your WordPress site to a minimum.
Backups
Maintain reliable backups.
Stay Up-to-Date
Do your best to stay up-to-date with your WordPress installation, including plugins and themes.
Trusted Sources
Do not get plugins/themes from sources that are not trusted.
Using https
Using a secure transfer protocol enables the site to encrypt all the data while communication between server and client, a necessary thing to have while managing sensitive information such as credit card and personal info.
Be sure to buy an official certificate from a Certificate Authority or if the budget is thigh, a Let’s Encrypt cert.
NOTE/TIP: You can check out our blog on installing an SSL certificate.
Getting a reliable host
If you are using a shared hosting make sure that all accounts are isolated and that yours can’t be accessed only by you
If you are managing your whole host by yourself add an extra layer of protection configuring firewall, brute force protection and change default ports, otherwise get an expert on server security.
NOTE/TIP: We help you with deciding which hosting to get. Like when you have doubts whether to use Digital Ocean or AWS.
Use strong passwords
Weak users and passwords are often the easiest way for a hacker to get into a server.
To avoid it, use a password generator or a passphrase and store it in a secure password manager
Use 2 Factor Authentication
Having a second way to authenticate yourself via mobile or email is an easy, but powerful way to avoid hackers even if they manage to get your password.
Limiting login attempts
Limiting the times that each user can try to login into your WordPress and server, will protect you against brute force attacks.
Warning: Always whitelist your IP
Plugins
With the help of WordPress plugins, you can get some proven, and automated features that will make your security management easier.
Remember to always use plugins that come from trusted sources.
Sucuri
Sucuri is the best plugin on security that you can get. It has been growing exponentially across the years in terms of features, quality, and it has a general acceptance from users.
Features such as WordPress hardening, email alerts, malware scanning, integrity checks, and Post-Hack actions are the best on the market.
Wordfence Security
Wordfence is one of the most complete and popular security plugins for WordPress, including a full malware scanner and brute force attacks protection plus the premium features.
Jetpack
This is a plugin made by the same people who created WordPress, this is a full-fledged, free plugin that will help you from security to SEO on your site.
*NOTE: You can take a look into the importance of SEO
Conclusion
Each day e-commerce takes more importance with the spread of the Internet across the world, and with this, more and more people are putting their money into it instead of the old-fashioned, real life, limited stores. There’s no price you can put into getting your site hacked and losing the reputation of your business, so having the best security practices implemented on your site in time will save you a lot of money and a lot of headaches.
Here in ClickIT, we have a team of experts that will keep your business up to date in the latest security best practices so that you can focus only on sells increment.
