WooCommerce is essential for promoting your products and services and creating greater brand awareness among your customers. Despite having many advantages, most of these online stores face security threats as they contain a lot of third-party information, links to payment gateways, etc.
If you have a WooCommerce store, then security needs to be your top priority. Even though you may consider your site to be secure, it’s still important to have your security measures in place.
What is WooCommerce, and how is it useful for a B2C business?
WooCommerce is the best e-commerce platform for online merchants to build their e-commerce store using WordPress. It uses some of the core functions of the operating system of WordPress to transform it into a fully functional online store. WooCommerce helps in adding product management, order processing along with shopping cart functionality to create a basic online store for selling your products.
You can sell physical and digital goods, affiliate transactions along with memberships. The software can be used for inventory management, managing sales tax, shipping cost calculations, etc. The basic functionality of WooCommerce may be enhanced by the more than three hundred available WooCommerce extensions for adding key features including bookings, product bundles, warranties and VAT calculations.
Top ways to improve the security of your WooCommerce store
Choose a secure host for your website
It’s not advisable to put your new store just about anywhere as you might put your customers at risk. Make sure to have a reliable host provider from a company that offers safety and security features including up to date server software, attack monitoring, and prevention, reviews of patches and threats, etc.
Using strong usernames and passwords
The username and passwords must not be easy to guess, but they must be easy to remember. There should be an upper- and lower-case letters, numerical and special characters to make the password difficult to guess by hackers. At the same time, use longer passwords which may be more complex and harder to guess by hackers.
Use two-factor authentication
A strong password may sometimes not provide enough protection on your store’s admin login. This may still enable hackers to gain access to your email and allow them to reset the password. Thus, two-factor authentication is a great way to safeguard your online accounts from intruders. This method typically relies on your smartphone to validate logins and for verifying the owner of the account.
Ideally, it’s necessary to enable two-factor authentication for all your accounts as it helps to secure your personal information. Even though it makes the login process lengthier, it leaves you to stress-free, knowing that your sensitive data is safe and secure.
Restrict login attempts
Brute force attacks are becoming more common these days, and it’s essential to protect your site against them. Most hackers use brute force cracking for accessing websites by randomly guessing usernames and passwords or trying the right combination. However, there is a simple solution for securing your website using Jetpack Protect. This security software offers state of the art security tools for keeping your site secure.
You can get access to features that include secure sign in, plugin updates, downtime monitoring along with paid spam protection, backups, among others. It also limits the number of times one can unsuccessfully attempt to login to your store before their IP address can be blocked.
Using Secure Socket Layer
WooCommerce powers almost 22% of the global e-commerce industry as it offers ease, simplicity, and is extensible. On the downside, it can be a target of cyber criminals where website owners often experience brute force login attacks and other security threats. Therefore, SSL certificate is a must to prevent such attacks, which secures and protects all transactions among destinations across networks.
By using encryption, SSL makes these transactions private, and every message which is transmitted needs to be passed an internal check for the integrity of encryption before it becomes successful. Depending on your business requirements, you can purchase an SSL certificate, which includes a basic SSL certificate, organization validation, EV SSL and Wildcard SSL certificate (covers multiple subdomains).
Adjust settings on FTP directories
You need to lock down your site’s sensitive directories through FTP. As shared hosting environments are insecure, they may enable individuals to access your file’s FTP. By doing so, they might upload harmful files to your WordPress directories, and by limiting write access to these directories, you can reduce the possibility of damage to the website.
Update your site and create backups
It’s recommended to take backups and test important updates across a staging site. Most site owners tend to ignore updates, but they make your e-commerce site more safe and secure., make sure to set some time aside every month, bi-weekly or once a week for reviewing your updates, making backups and test them before deploying them to your site.
Choose a secure payment gateway
Payment gateways are an essential feature of every online e-commerce store. This type of service is offered by online merchants or third parties that allow for the transfer of money across different accounts. Hence, it’s important to have payment providers who are reliable and provide safe and secure transactions.
Use paid and premium themes
It’s easy to use free themes offered by WordPress while setting up online stores. Most of these free themes meet the necessary security features, but paid ones can be safer to use as they contain additional security features with regular updates.
Conclusion
WooCommerce online stores are gaining popularity, but they face an increasing security threat from cyber-crimes. Before investing in any online business, it’s essential to spend enough time in upgrading the safety features of your WooCommerce store to save a lot of time and money.
It’s essential to win your customers’ trust and build your brand identity by ensuring the safety and security of your site. By following the security measures which we’ve discussed above, you can attract targeted visitors to your website and increase your sales prospects.
Require WooCommerce Shipping Solutions?
If you-re running a WooCommerce e-commerce business, you are likely looking to scale at some point. Scaling your business beyond your national borders may be challenging. Luckily, there are order fulfillment providers who can help you store and manage inventory, handle the pick pack process and ship the goods cross-border, world-wide. Floship is one of Asia’s leading e-commerce order fulfillment providers. We would love to have a talk and provide you with a custom fulfillment solution. Fill out our custom solution form to get in touch.
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