With a market share of 30 percent, WooCommerce takes the lead among eCommerce sites around the world. This places it, and with good cause, well ahead of other sites like Squarespace, Shopify, and Magento. Together, WordPress and WooCommerce provide your online store with a high degree of flexibility, customizability, and stability.
The success of the website, sadly, also makes it a lucrative destination for hackers. When the WooCommerce domain gets compromised, relative to normal sites, the effects of a hacked site are exacerbated. This is because you will not only lose search engine traffic and results, you will now have clients and profits that will have a dramatic effect on your online market.
There are steps you need to take to keep your WooCommerce store secure for you and your users, though there is a certain degree of in-built security. And if something goes wrong, you need to have a mechanism in place to mitigate downtime so that it doesn’t damage your business.
We discuss the security vulnerabilities that occur among WooCommerce websites in this article and the measures to be taken to keep ahead of cybersecurity threats.
TL;DR—
A WooCommerce site’s security needs are different from a normal site. You need a wp protection plugin built to take care of these additional specifications. To continue to proactively defend your website, instal MalCare. It will search the site frequently and you will quickly clean up any malware.
15 Best Security Tips from WooCommerce
There are various types of protection you can enforce to keep the site safe on WordPress to make it rock solid so that hackers have no chance of entering. We can break it down into three levels:
Security Level 1
Change your default username ‘admin’
Hackers use a brute force attack strategy in which they aim to infer the combination of your username and password. They attack admin accounts unless the platform has full authorisation.
Leaving your username as ‘admin’ makes hacking into your site too easy for them. Think of it as leaving the door with your key.
For something that is special and hard to guess, build a username. Go to User > Add New to update the WordPress admin name.
Enter all the information needed, but make sure to use a specific username. Create a new account now and pick ‘Administrator’ from the WordPress user roles available.
When you’re finished, you need to log out of your wp-admin account. With the new password, sign back up. Now the old ‘admin’ user account can be removed. The latest one would be transferred to all posts affiliated with the ‘admin’ domain.
Use a strong password
One of the most common sources of hacking is bad passwords. You need to use powerful passwords to remain ahead of the game and defeat hackers during their brute-force attempts. Mind, you have a password for wp-admin that you do not use for any other account. Maintain a special password allocated to this account only and not used elsewhere.
Now, here are three security tips to help make your password strong:
- Rather than using a password, use a passphrase. Rather than just one letter, a passphrase is a collection of phrases. For instance, you can use ‘thisismycomputer’ instead of setting your password as ‘computer’.
- Often, you can use acronyms. At BlogVault, for example, John F Kennedy is jfk@bv. But the password is still very small.
- Next, you should always use a combination of letters, numerals, and symbols such as Jfk@Bv123$. But it’s still not strong enough.
- By combining the above three tips, we can create a super-strong password like ‘ThisisJfk@Bv123$’. It has a phrase, acronyms, uppercase letters, lower case letters, numerals and symbols in no particular order.
Now, you’ve got yourself a strong password that’s difficult to guess.
Security Level 2
Backup your website
You might be curious how the security tips feature a backup. It’s one of the most significant items for any website to do. It is terrible when a daily website goes down. It’s tragic when a WooCommerce platform goes down-you stand to lose clients, orders, and sales.
You will recover it easily and get back to work if your website is compromised. You have to find out the explanation for the breach, though, and patch it so that you’re not hacked again.
The explanation why we emphasise the value of backups is that you work with confidential consumer details while you own a WooCommerce website. Such a platform will include consumers’ personal records, transaction numbers, facts about credit cards, transfers, and orders.
Having a copy of your website is completely important so that you can not miss this data.
You need to incorporate a real-time WooCommerce backup solution, because WooCommerce sees regular customers and orders. This will make sure that it is automatically backed up as new data is created on your web.
In addition, ensure that the backup is securely saved in an encrypted form. If it falls into the hands of hackers by accident, so they can’t do something about it.
Losing WooCommerce data will be a severe violation of confidence that could become a big security problem for the organisation with many repercussions and a high recovery cost.
Install a security plugin
Next on the agenda is to add a security plugin to protect your site from hackers on your WooCommerce site. A hacked WooCommerce site would have effects that are more serious than normal pages, as we described.
You could be Google blacklisted, your web host removed, and lose clients and sales. In addition, you could face legal trouble if there is any lack of consumer records.
A decent plugin will search the website extensively on a daily basis and check for any hacks, ransomware or unusual activities.
There are several WordPress security plugins available on the market, but they do not all provide the same degree of security.
Many plugins depend on malware scanning and cleaning methods that are obsolete. But you might be warned that when it’s truly safe, there is malware on the site. And there are moments when you might assume your site is safe, but these scanners often have disguised or secret malware that goes undetected.
You simply should not take the risk of using an unstable plugin, as WooCommerce deals with extremely confidential data. You need a firewall to proactively secure your site from hackers in order to secure your site. You will need a scanner that can detect masked and secret malware as hackers are improving their tactics with every passing moment.
This is why we highly advise using a premium plugin that is trustworthy and promised to keep the site safe, such as MalCare. You should rest assured that you are not getting false positives, that you cannot find some sort of malware, and that in no time you will clean your hacked website.
Get an SSL certificate
This is a very easy move you need to take on your website to ensure that you enforce it. An SSL certificate guarantees that there is protection of confidential information that is transmitted between a customer and the website. This removes the risk that hackers could get their hands on this data.
If you add SSL to your site, the name of your website will be updated from http to https in the address bar, and a padlock will appear on the top.
Earlier, it was pricey and required a long process to get an SSL licence. SSL certificates are also provided by most WooCommerce hosting sites. But now, you can get an SSL certificate for free in no time, thanks to initiatives like LetsEncrypt.
For a WooCommerce site, go to WooCommerce > Configuration > Advanced once you get an SSL licence. Here, ‘Force Safe Checkout’ can be allowed.
Now, to keep your site on WooCommerce secure, you have taken one more important measure. Yet there’s a great deal left to do!
Keep your website updated at all times
From time to time, every programme gets updates to add new functionality, repair glitches, and cover up security holes that might have been present. Updating software is necessary and inevitable. Running your website on the new tech ensures that you will have the latest security patches.
The WordPress core app, along with themes and plugins, includes a WooCommerce platform. To guarantee that the site doesn’t contain any bugs that hackers may use, all three components need to be held up to date.
You should follow the comprehensive guidance from BlogVault to securely upgrade your WordPress websites.
Security Level 3
Limit Login attempts
Delving further into assaults by brute force, hackers use bots to do their job for them. This means that in a second, they will attempt thousands of variations. We’ve already shown you how a good username and password can be set. Then why bother with restricting attempts to login?
There is seldom a single-handedly run WooCommerce platform. With different positions to fill, there are several users introduced to the wp-admin dashboard. The more visitors you have, the higher the likelihood that a hacker can break in. WordPress allows an infinite number of login attempts by example.
Limiting login attempts on your WordPress dashboard is a suggested security measure. Just three attempts to get their username and password correct can be offered to users. After that, the ‘forgot password’ alternative is offered to them or they can even get shut out of their accounts.
You’ll automatically have access to login security on your WooCommerce account if you have enabled the MalCare plugin.
Use 2-factor authentication
Implementing 2-factor authentication is another step you should take to make it difficult for hackers to break in.
This ensures that anybody attempting to log in to the dashboard of WordPress would need to have their passwords as well as a protected password created in real-time. This could be a one-time password sent to apps like Google Authenticator to a mobile number or a code created.
This removes the chances that hackers can guess combinations or misuse ill-gotten knowledge.
Harden your website
In other words, to make your website more stable, WordPress recommends that you take some steps to harden your website.
We also covered three major steps that you need to take:
If a hacker gains access to your website, they can inject malware via the file editor option that is available on your dashboard under plugins and themes. Disabling the file editor in plugins and themes
Website owners of WooCommerce hardly ever use this editor, so it’s best to uninstall it.
Stop PHP Execution in Untrusted Directories The WP website consists of files and folders, and php functions are only used by some of them. When a hacker joins a website, they can inject their own features, or even build new ones, into files and directories.
By blocking the execution of php functions in untrusted directories, you need to block these operations.
Adjust Security Keys WordPress saves your login credentials automatically so that you can quickly log in to your dashboard. It encrypts this data and uses encryption keys and salts to store it.
They will decode the code to break into your account if hackers find out the authentication keys and salts.
It is advised that you replace keys and salts occasionally to prevent this.
It needs a bit of professional advice to execute these steps manually. Recommended reading: 12 Ways to Harden Your WordPress Website Safe. However, website hardening is automatic and can be introduced in only a few clicks if you are a MalCare customer.
Conclusion: Still protect your WooCommerce website!
Protection is vital on every WordPress website, so when it’s a WooCommerce one, it’s intensified! Gone are the days when there were working hours in supermarkets. With the dawn of eCommerce, shops are open 24/7 and it is easy to make cash round the clock. Any website downtime will therefore have dreadful consequences on the business.
In comparison, an eCommerce firm works with important and proprietary details from businesses that do not slip into the wrongs. But most critically, it also deals with customer-specific data, which is personal identifying information (PII). You break the consumer confidence if leaked and will risk the credibility of your company. But worst, in recovering from the data leak, you could face civil fines, litigation and high costs.
The risks are far higher and you can literally not afford to allow any security lapses.
Install the MalCare protection plugin to block threats, get rid of ransomware, and get absolute WooCommerce security in order to enforce a high degree of security on your WooCommerce web.