How to Keep your Turnkey Website Secure

Keeping your turnkey website secure is a vital operation to your internet property. Unfortunately there are a lot of people out there that want to either deface, hijack or destroy your website. Most of the time you won’t even know what’s happening until it’s too late.

Here is a small list of side-effects to your turnkey website from being hacked, hijacked or infected:

Black listed emails and/or domain for sending SPAM
Flagged by Google for hosting Malware
Website promoting foreign agendas
Website redirecting to other domains

These are just a sample of what can happen and once you’ve been hacked it’s a much more difficult to recover. So being proactive can save a lot of future headaches.

What to do…

To help prevent hacks to your turnkey website in the future, here are some things you can do:

Keep WordPress up to date – This is the most important and probably the easiest one to do. You can even set WordPress to automatically update to the latest version (highly recommended).
Keep all plugins up to date – Leaving old versions of plugins for an extended period of time can leave vulnerabilities and entice hackers. If a plugin has not been updated within 6 months to a 1 year, you should think about finding a replacement and delete the out dated plugin.
Use strong passwords – Always use a strong password with multiple special characters and numerals. Don’t use short words either, make it as hard as possible to hack.
Use SSL – It’s a must in today’s internet, not only for security but for Google to even index your website. Let’s Encrypt is a free SSL certificate that’s easy to use and usually can be installed from the cPanel of your niche website hosting.
Install security specific plugins – There are many plugins out there that will add layers of security, here are a few to think about using:

Remember to always backup your turnkey website periodically and before making any major changes to it. By staying up to date, it will minimize the chances of your website being hacked, hijacked or infected. Never a fun thing to try to recover from.