Tips & Tricks

Tips to Enhance Security On Your Magento Website

April 23, 2019

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Tips enhance security for Magento website is now the lastest topic among business. Why? The modern world is heavily dependent on e-commerce. From consumer level to business owners, everyone looks for an easier way to purchase their needs. E-commerce platforms around the world have grown dramatically in the last 10 years. Magento is a popular name that comes up whenever you want to talk about e-commerce. Surveys suggest that Magento might be the largest shareholder in the e-commerce platform. More and more e-commerce site owners use Magento to build and manage their e-commerce website. Though Magento is a relatively secure platform to work on, you can always enhance security by adopting some simple measures and a more secure e-commerce website for yourself.

Table of Contents

I. Why Need To Enhance Security for Magento website?

Before going in depth with what you can do to enhance your Magento website security, it is necessary that you know why you need to enhance your Magento website security. Cybercriminals around the world are better equipped now more than ever and they need one simple crack in your security to breach it and steal valuable information. The most common form of cyber-attacks are:

Spamming: Spams are links which are a form of clickbait and it will redirect you to an insecure platform where it is easy for the cybercriminals to steal your information.
Phishing: Phishing is very common now with millions of websites and servers running simultaneously. Phishing pages look real which will ask for your user names, passwords, credit card numbers, etc. and misuse those data to their benefit.
Miscellaneous: Apart from the two most common methods of cyber-attack, hackers are always inventing new ways to hack into your website and steal your vulnerable admin or user data.

II. How to Enhance Security?

Magento itself provides the basic security layer for your convenience. But you need to take this one step further and make sure no one can penetrate your Magento website. Let us get started on how you can enhance the security of your website.

Encrypted Connection

Considering all your transaction will be made over an internet connection, it is necessary to use a secured connection. As an admin, you need to log in your credentials to access the website and use your card numbers or bank information all the time to complete transactions. If your connection is not properly encrypted, you run the risk of a breach in your security any time. Popular SSL layer securities like HTTPS is a great option to encrypt your end-to-end transactions. In the past, HTTPS was only used to secure payment pages of a website. But now it is important to use HTTPS across the Magento website to ensure maximum security. In Magento, it is really easy to enable this encryption method by just browsing through the â€œUse secure URLsâ€ menu.

2. Stay Up to Date

One of the most important security is the built-in security that any platform provides. Developers tend to know the source code and they also know what the possible threats to their code might be. They therefore work very hard relentlessly to improve security. It is necessary that you always use the latest updated version of your Magento website. Developers include new security updates every time they roll out an update. These updates eliminate any existing security issue and add value to the overall Magento website security.

3. Strong Credentials

You have seen this message on numerous occasions. Any website that needs a username and a password, it suggests a strong and unique password. Most of the cyber attacks on Magento websites succeed because merchants donâ€™t use passwords which are strong enough. A simple password, though easy to remember, is also easy to crack and thatâ€™s why hackers get through. Some simple ways to make a strong password is to make it relatively long, combine upper case and lower-case alphabets, use numbers, characters and anything unique you can find on the keyboard. Do not use any patterns. Keep your password as random as possible, and voila, you have created a strong log in credential for your Magento website.

4. 2 Step Verification

This is a very popular and useful security feature used by a lot of social media websites and business websites as well. 2 step verification creates an extra layer of security. So, if any hacker gets through the first layer of your website security, he will need another code or any verification that comes directly from you. This will work as an alert system for you and you can take steps to secure your website once again.

5. Extensions

Adding extensions to any website makes everything easier for the user. E-commerce website users can benefit in a lot of ways if they use the Magento extension. So, as a merchant of a Magento website, it is your duty to check the credibility of every extension before you allow them to be installed. Make sure you run a proper background check, read user reviews and if possible, track the source code and see if they provide regular updates. This is because an outdated browser extension is a very good entrance for security breaches.

6. Hosting Plan

Considering all the expenses they have to go through to maintain a Magento website, owners often opt for shared hosting plans. Though shared plans will save you some money but run a huge security risk in the long run. Shared hosting plans allow different domains to be hosted in one server. As a result, if one of them has weak security features, all the other domains fall victim as well. It is always wise to invest in a dedicated hosting server that can also handle sudden traffic spikes from time to time. Security is not something you want to compromise on.

Henry is the digital operation at Syncoria, a digital transformation solution firm based in Toronto, Canada.

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