Safety and security are currently a primary concern for many people. Strangely, however, there is a disturbing lack of attention paid to security in the digital realm – a fact that hackers all over the world have exploited to great gain. These hackers continue to make millions from taking advantage of weaknesses in websites and applications. According to Forbes, thirty thousand websites are hacked every day, with the average data breach costing as much as $8.64 million according to Statista. Alarmingly, these numbers are not likely to decrease any time soon. In fact, by 2025, hacking is predicted to cost the global economy as much as $10.5 trillion per year according to this article from Cybercrime Magazine. With attacks becoming more and more sophisticated every day, it’s important to take action and secure your website. Considered by many to be one of the best website security programs available, Sucuri serves as an excellent way to defend your website thanks to the robust security package it offers to website owners.

How to Secure Your Website Using Sucuri

How to Secure Your Website Using Sucuri

Safety and security are currently a primary concern for many people. Strangely, however, there is a disturbing lack of attention paid to security in the digital realm – a fact that hackers all over the world have exploited to great gain. These hackers continue to make millions from taking advantage of weaknesses in websites and applications. According to Forbes, thirty thousand websites are hacked every day, with the average data breach costing as much as $8.64 million according to Statista. Alarmingly, these numbers are not likely to decrease any time soon. In fact, by 2025, hacking is predicted to cost the global economy as much as $10.5 trillion per year according to this article from Cybercrime Magazine. With attacks becoming more and more sophisticated every day, it’s important to take action and secure your website. Considered by many to be one of the best WordPress security plugins available, Sucuri serves as an excellent way to defend your website thanks to the robust security package it offers to website owners.

Common Attacks

Sucuri provides protection against the most common digital attacks, including distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, brute force attacks, and viruses. A DDOS attack takes place when an attacker uses bots to send an overwhelming amount of web traffic to your site. Unable to handle all the requests it’s receiving, your site either slows down or, in a worst case scenario, shuts down completely. These kinds of attacks affect more than one third of businesses in the United States every year. Sucuri defends against these attacks by simply blocking the programs generating the traffic. The programs are added to a blacklist and prevented from flooding your website with data.
Another very common attack on websites is the brute force attack. As I discussed in my article on web hosting, a brute force attack involves using a program to automatically enter hundreds or even thousands of passwords until the program eventually finds the right one and gains access to your site. Sucuri provides protection against this kind of attack by limiting the number of login attempts and blocking programs that exceed this number.
Lastly, Sucuri provides protection against viruses and malware using their robust Website Application Firewall program. Using machine learning, Sucuri can analyze methods of attack used by viruses and malware, and then automatically create defenses for these attacks. When a malicious bot or program is identified, it is immediately blocked from accessing your site. Additionally, Sucuri performs regular site scans so that if a virus does somehow make it past the firewall, it can be quickly identified and deleted.

Performance

Not only does Sucuri provide security, they can also speed up your website by 70% thanks to their content delivery network (CDN). A CDN is essentially a group of servers that are placed at different locations throughout the world. When someone navigates to your website, they will access your website via the closest CDN server, allowing for faster connections. As an added bonus, Sucuri offers to take care of all the configuration for the CDN, making it a very simple process for customers. Utilizing Sucuri’s CDN will result is a faster-loading, more professional website.

Sucuri also provides search engine optimization (SEO) spam removal. One of the best ways to improve your site’s SEO is by adding inbound links from other websites to your own site. Google interprets these links as a sign that you are a reliable source, and rewards your site with a higher Google ranking. However, it’s important that these links come from reputable websites. If a suspicious website provides a link to your site, Google will instead perceive your site as suspicious and decrease your Google ranking. With this in mind, it’s important to monitor where your inbound links are coming from. While you can’t delete links coming from other websites, you can disavow them using Google’s disavow feature, which will direct Google to ignore the link.
Lastly, if your website is deemed suspicious, Sucuri offers to remove your site from these databases of suspicious websites known as blocklists. Sites can be added to blocklists for several different reasons. One reason is links from suspicious websites (as mentioned above). Additionally, if you are sending large amounts of emails from a domain email address and the emails are being marked as spam by the recipients, it’s likely you’ll end up on a blocklist. Thankfully, in the event that this happens, Sucuri offers to remove your site from the blocklist and restore your website’s reputation.

Conclusion

Website security is not something to be taken lightly. In light of the growing number of devastating hacks throughout the world, it’s important to be proactive in protecting your digital assets. Thankfully, programs like Sucuri are able to do an excellent job of not only defending your website, but also improving its performance, resulting in secure data and happy customers. If you have any questions about website security or need help securing your website, feel free to reach out to (239) 776-9180 or info@blueprintwebdesign.com. It’s vital to ensure that your website is secure, and I’d be happy to answer any questions you may have on how to better defend your website.

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