When hiring a design agency, there are many more things to consider than solely the aesthetics of the website that they are going to create. Will the website be easy to navigate for the users? Will the website have the right tools and setup for the customer to complete updates and manage changes? One often overlooked question: what steps will you take to safeguard my website and keep out potential threats?

Although security is often overlooked, it is important that the web design firm that is contracted understands the needs of your business and understand how to keep out potential threats to your website and your business. We’ll highlight just some of the essential tips and strategies to help you ensure that your vision remains unblemished by malicious actors.

1. Keep your website updated: Ensuring that your website has regular updates is not just for adding the newest features, but there are almost always security updates and bug fixes to ensure that your website continues to perform quickly and minimize security risks. To complete this you need to ensure that your WordPress environment is up-to-date along with any themes and plugins that are being used.
2. Secure Themes and Plugins: When deciding on your particular theme, you need to make sure to use one that is maintained regularly, and the same goes for your plugins. When looking at plugins and themes make sure to read the reviews, and look at the compatibility with the current version of WordPress. Plugins that are out of date, or not updated to the current version of WordPress could allow potential vulnerabilities.
3. Strong Login Security: Leaving no protection on your website’s login screen could allow for brute force attacks to happen. A brute force attack is where a program is used to attempt a password over and over again very quickly to try to discover the password that is being used. Installing a program like Wordfence can allow more control over this process. You can enable two-factor authentication (2FA) which requires users to provide two different authentication elements before gaining access to the website. Wordfence will also allow you to limit logins, so if someone is trying a brute force attack they will be locked out of the login screen thus limiting their ability to login.
4. Limit Privileges: By limiting new users to having only read access, if someone is able to gain access to your website they would have limited abilities to do anything once they are inside the website.
5. Regular Backups: New content is added regularly to a website, and thus adding regular backups to your rotation will allow your website to be restored if something terrible does happen.
6. Hosting: Making sure to select a secure host is paramount to ensuring a website continues to function properly. If your host does not keep up with proper updates and security, then everything you do on your side if for not. Someone could still gain access to your website.
7. Regular Audits: One of the most important things to consider is regular security audits. Are there any additional unknown users, posts, or pages? Are all of the plug-ins and themes updating properly? Are the backups being performed according to schedules? It is important to run through a checklist to ensure that everything is continuing to function as it should.

Although, this is a large list it is not everything that could happen. That is why it is very important to hire a company that understands the things that could happen to your website, and has a plan in place to deter malicious actors when they try to compromise your website. They should also have a plan in place should something happen to get your website back online as quickly as possible.