8 Must Use WooCommerce Security Tips to Protect Your Online Store

Who does not know that running an online business is not as easy as ABC. It surely requires a lot of tasks and handling magnanimous work. Whether it is creating a store or managing it, your eCommerce store requires all the things to be taken care of starting from adding the products, fixing the bugs to strategizing marketing activities. And, among all these headaches, you will be most worried about is your site’s security. No doubt, online theft and hacking are on the rise.

Profusely, the security and protection of your web store must be of top priority, as it includes your customers’ login details and other personal information.

Usually, many businesses use the WooCommerce store to build their primary online shop. Surprisingly, as per the records, more than 52% of online market shops are built on the WooCommerce platform leveraging the potential of expert WooCommerce web designers and developers. And as a fact, the more the market value the more the chances of being hacked. Therefore, strengthening the security of Woocommerce stores is most crucial.

Want to build your WooCommerce store? Check this How to Build Your Store Guide

If you already have a WooCommerce web store, then let’s walk through the series of security measures that can help you protect and secure your WooCommerce store. No doubt, an excellent WooCommerce website design can always be complemented with a strong security system for good returns.

Install Secure SSL Certificates
Take Multiple Backups
Keep Your Site Updated
Imply Security Plugins
Go for A Secure Hosting
Limit Login Attempts
Use Strong Passwords
Important to Protect wp-config.php File

Install Secure SSL Certificates

Although Woocommerce comes with security, add an SSL security system to your WooCommerce, which is quite necessary. Specifically, this security is required on your site’s checkout, account login and account creation pages. This information is quite vital and too sensitive, therefore, to and fro of this information from the user to the website, needs to travel through an encrypted medium.

Also, remember that Google browser now has also started marking Non-SSL sites as Not-Secure websites. Adding SSL on your website may seem to be complicated to you, but with expert WooCommerce developers, the task is easier and can be done quickly.

Take Multiple Backups

Usually, entrepreneurs, businessmen and developers ignore the importance of keeping multiple backups. However, keeping multiple backups of your WooCommerce website is the most viable option when it comes to security. It not only gives you a good night’s sleep but also helps you to easily restore your virus-free website instantly.

If you are unsure how to handle this, then Woocommerce development services can easily handle this tricky task for you. Hence, keeping multiple backups of your website should be one of your top priorities.

Keep Your Site Updated

Website owners normally miss updating their Woo-commerce store with respect to new updates brought by the WordPress developers’ community. WordPress brings version updates occasionally along with regular security fixes to overcome the loopholes and vulnerabilities detected in the existing core. An efficient WooCommerce web developer can able to easily upgrade your store for version updates.

However, it is not crucial to upgrade your website for every single version release of WordPress. For example, if you are currently using WordPress 4.3.x and WordPress 4.4 is released, it is not mandatory to update your website to the latest version. On the contrary, if there is a major version update then it is ought to be compulsory to get the update done for major security reasons.

Imply Security Plugins

WordPress is the most secure open-source platform in the world of online platforms. There are multiple WordPress security plugins offered for the Woocommerce websites that help a lot in securing your online store. You can pick up anyone secure system plugin from WordPress for your website as adding too many security plugins may break your site.

Some of the top WooCommerce security plugins are

All In One WP Security & Firewall
iThemes Security
MalCare Security Solution
Sucuri Security
Wordfence

Your Woocommerce web developer can easily install this plugin and help to secure the website for numerous online transactions.

Go for A Secure Hosting

Just adding a security plugin to your WordPress site is not enough. It is also crucial to protect your hosting server to protect against malign viruses. Protecting with firewalls, using a strong SSH username and password and changing permissions on the paramount files are some of the things to take care of.

If you are hosting your eCommerce store on a third-party hosting provider, then ensure that your host is implying server-level security. And, check that all the communication and transaction between and the hosted servers are encrypted. If you are unsure of the hosting servers, you can always rely on a Woocommerce development company in India to help you secure your hosting server whether internal or third party.

Limit Login Attempts

With the help of new technologies like machine learning and AI, hackers can easily break through the weak passwords and drain out the important information from your website or hack your users’ credit card details. However, changing your user account login details with a strong password is not foolproof. Therefore, limiting the user login attempts is the best option.

Implying the solution to limit login attempts from particular IP addresses, can help to protect against insecure activities. Setting a limit for how many attempts that specific address is viable. This will automatically block the force attacks by hackers against your online store and protects it against viruses, malicious bots and attackers.

Use Strong Passwords

Attackers can easily attack and pull out the details when your user password is too weak. Normally, a Brute force attack implies a method to simply use the combination of passwords to crack the security. Passwords like your or family member names, girlfriends or wife’s names, birthdays, anniversary dates, company names are some of the weak passwords and are quite easy to break.

Therefore, it is always recommended to create strong passwords for strong security. Interestingly, for stronger passwords, WordPress comes with a built-in feature “Better Passwords” that help generate a powerful and more secure password for its users.

Important to Protect wp-config.php File

Under your entire WordPress site system, one of the most crucial files is the wp-config.php file. This file is important as it carries a gigantic amount of sensitive and important information about your site. It is holding items like your WordPress site’s security keys as well as the details of your database connection. In case, anyone gets hold of this file, then the damage caused to your online web store would be unbelievable and incalculable.

Therefore, the first step is of protecting your wp-config.php file. And, to do so, deny access to everyone except you. Alternatively, you can create a duplicate config.php file and trash all the sensitive data from the main wp-config.php file.

At The End

Things To Avoid To Secure Your WooCommerce Website

There are numerous myths and false information floating around in the digital world regarding WooCommerce security. Therefore, here is the myriad of things that you should not follow even when anyone obliged you to do so as these are not worth your effort and time.

Hiding your login URL
Password protecting your core files
Changing your database prefix
Removing WordPress version number

With regards to your security improvements, the above-mentioned measures won’t even move a speck of dust. Contrarily, these things may play havoc on your users.

So, if you are still skeptical about the security of your website and in a quandary about how to fix the security issues of your online store. Then it is time to check the most trusted and reliable WooCommerce development company in India.