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Do you own an e-commerce website? Then you’d have already ensured your website begins with HTTPS:// and has a locked padlock icon in its address bar. If not, you could be in trouble.
Usually when customers come to shop from your online store, they might start judging its overall appearance. And they don’t merely look for the right products. They would rather want to have the best-in-class shopping experience. And of course they’d also want to ensure the security and privacy of their personal data and online payments.
So if your e-commerce store isn’t well secured, all your efforts and the sales strategies that you’ve adopted might fall between the cracks.
Your website security is not complete just with the “https” factor. There’re yet some other significant aspects that you’d want to look for. Let’s begin with the HTTPS in detail.
1. Secure your e-commerce website with HTTPS: Set up SSL
With just HTTP, your website data remains unencrypted and thus attackers can easily intercept all your information. If you require your website to collect critical information such as credit/debit card details, banking credentials or any other personal information of your customers, you can’t afford to keep it insecure.
Initially you need to configure SSL certification on your website. You can purchase the certificate from a recognized SSL hosting provider (for example:- GoDaddy, Comodo SSL, GlobalSign SSL Certificates) and install it on your website.
With SSL, users can ensure that the data they send will be unreadable to hackers, identity thieves, or anyone except the destination server. After installing the SSL certificate successfully, you can update your e-commerce site to use HTTPS.
HTTPS protects sensitive information by establishing a secure connection between your server and the user’s browser. Securing your website with HTTPS makes your e-commerce website look more trustworthy so that your customers never hesitate to make payment from your website.
2. Get your e-commerce website hosted with an efficient web hosting provider
While selecting an e-commerce hosting service, you should look for the specifications such as SSL, database support, online payment services, security aspects and other specific shopping features to set up and manage a business online. A genuine e-commerce hosting provider (For example:- A2 Hosting, SiteGround, InMotion, Bluehost) that offers safe and reliable hosting services ensure optimal operation of your website.
If you’re running an e-commerce business, your top focus should be to keep customer data secure. The major security factors to consider when choosing an ideal web hosting service are:
- SSL certification — To ensure the protection of your customer’s sensitive information through data encryption.
- Network monitoring — To measure the performance of your computer network.
- DDoS Prevention — To detect and take preventive measures against DDoS attacks.
- Automatic data backups — To maintain a duplicate copy of your website files and database so that you can prevent the loss of critical data.
- Malware detection and removal — To identify and remove malware from your website.
3. Build your online store using the best and most reliable e-commerce platform
You need to give more importance to security when choosing an e-commerce platform. Many of the major e-commerce platforms provide automatic security updates thereby making you less worried. The e-commerce platforms like WordPress, WooCommerce, etc. have a ton of different plugins and extensions that enable you to add an additional security layer to your e-commerce store. The other popular e-commerce platforms include Magento, Shopify, PrestaShop etc.
4. Prevent unauthorized access with firewall
You can use firewall software and plugins (For example:- Sucuri, HTTP Security Firewall, FireWall) to monitor your website traffic and block the security threats before they reach your e-commerce site. With firewall settings, you can easily control traffic flowing in and out of your network, thereby securing your e-commerce store from hackers and viruses.
5. Make your website PCI DSS compliant to secure the credit/debit card data of your clients
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of requirements and standards designed to secure the storage and transmission of cardholder data. When you adhere to the guidelines proposed by PCI Standards Council, then you’re said to be PCI compliant.
If your website is dealing with online card payments, you should necessarily make it PCI DSS compliant. And hence you would be able to secure your e-commerce website from credit card frauds and identity thieves.
6. Ensure the safety of user credentials
Hackers use advanced software and specialized techniques to steal the login credentials of your customers. What you can do about this is to demand them to set a password that is sufficiently strong and least common. You’d also remind them to change their passwords occasionally.
These guidelines can certainly help you secure your e-commerce website and thus make it more stable and robust.
In brief
The ever-growing trend of online shopping has made it an essential component of our lives today. And you’d be aware that millions of online transactions happen on the internet each day. Meanwhile, cyber crooks are keenly waiting for an opportunity to break into the e-commerce websites.
Cyber criminals increasingly target small to midsize enterprises rather than the Fortune 500 companies. Wondering why? Most of the small businesses don’t care much about the online security and privacy of their users. And this paves way for the hackers to quickly find and exploit the security loopholes in their websites.
So if you take the responsibility to maintain your website’s security, you can easily ensure you never fall victim to online thefts or any other cybersecurity threats.
