Woocommerce is one of the best WordPress plugins that’s being used by most web developers for eCommerce web design. With the increasing popularity of Woocommerce, it has also become a target for several hackers and attackers. Therefore, it becomes very important to take some precautionary measures when using Woocommerce for your online store development.
In this blog post, I am going to share 7 tips to secure a Woocommerce website.
#1 Keep updated
If you’re using Woocommerce for your eCommerce website, you must make sure to update the WordPress core to its latest version. WordPress occasionally gets a major version release after every few months. These version updates often have regular security fixes as and when the vulnerabilities are detected in the existing core.
Not only this, but you must also make sure to update all the plugins & themes to their latest versions. Using outdated plugins can really affect the security of your eCommerce website. But before you update any of your plugins or themes, you must make sure to back up your website because some plugins or theme updates can cause problems on your website. If you notice any problem after the plugin update, you must restore your website to its previous backup and consult a WordPress developer to assist you.
#2 Invest in SSL
Adding SSL on your WooCommerce store is essential, especially on the checkout and account login/signup pages. As some confidential information is being exchanged between the user and the website, it is important that this information must travel over an encrypted platform.
Search engines like Google give a minor ranking boost to those websites that have SSL 2048-bit key certificates. So you have another reason to implement SSL on your eCommerce website.
#3 Add security plugins
There are plenty of plugins available to secure WordPress websites. There are two best plugins that I recommend my clients to use for their Woocommerce stores:
1. Wordfence
2. Sucuri Security
Make sure to use only one single security plugin for your website, otherwise, it can result in the non-functioning of some of the important security features.
#4 Strong passwords
When you run an online store, you have an additional responsibility to protect the sensitive information of your customers. Therefore, you must make sure that all the passwords (admin, FTP, control panel) are stronger and tougher to crack. You can use plugins like Strong Password Generator that will help you to generate strong passwords.
#5 Admin URL & Username
Most of the Woocommerce stores have a common (default) URL for admin, which is sitename.com/wp-admin or sitename.com/admin. These URLs are very easy to guess and are considered trump cards for attackers. Therefore, it’s recommended that you change the default admin URL to a customized one which is tougher to guess. Not only the URL, but you must also change the default username (admin) of your WordPress admin section.
In order to change the username of your WordPress admin section, you can simply go to User -> Add New and create a new admin account. After that, you may log out and log in with the new admin account and delete the previous account but do make sure to associate all previous posts to the new admin user otherwise the whole content (posts) on your website could be deleted with the removal of ‘admin’ user.
For customizing the admin URL, you may use some plugins like Protect Your Admin. This plugin helps solve the hacking problem by allowing webmasters to customize their admin panel URLs and blocking the default links.
#6 Disable file editing
To make your Woocommerce store more secure, you must also disable the file editing from the WordPress backend. So, next time when you need to edit any file, you can either enable it for some time or you may use only FTP. Below is the code which you can add in your wp-config.php file and disable the file editing from the backend:
define( ‘DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT’, true );
#7 Database Security
Just like securing Woocommerce admin passwords, you must ensure that your database also has strong passwords. You must also change the default prefix of your database. By default, it’s “wp_”, so you may change it to something else like “site01222_” which will be hard to guess for the attackers. You can easily do this with the help of plugins like DB Prefix Change.