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Five Website Security Checks Any Irish Business Can Do in Five Minutes
Your website is often the first thing a customer sees and the easiest thing to forget about. These five checks take minutes and catch the problems that quietly cost businesses money and trust.
1. Is your SSL certificate valid and when does it expire?
An expired certificate makes browsers show a full-page warning and visitors leave. Most hosts renew free certificates automatically, but automatic renewal silently fails more often than you would expect.
2. Does the plain http address redirect to https?
Visitors who type your address without the secure prefix should be sent to the encrypted version automatically. Without that, parts of your site may be served insecurely.
3. When does your domain name expire?
If your domain lapses, your website and every email address on it stop working, and someone else can register it. Check the renewal date with your registrar and turn on auto-renew.
4. Is everything behind the site being updated?
That means WordPress or your CMS, plugins, and the server software underneath, including PHP. We covered what happened when a critical PHP flaw hit in October in this recent post. Know who is responsible for updates, because it is often nobody.
5. Are the basic security headers switched on?
Headers such as HSTS, X-Frame-Options and X-Content-Type-Options cost nothing and block whole classes of attack. Most small business sites have none. You can see all five checks, plus speed and software version disclosure, in one go with our free Website Health Checker.