12 Key Security Tips for Your Company Website in 2024

Keeping Your New Corporate Website Secure

Corporate website security management is a concern for any large organisation.

More business than ever is being conducted online.

This means businesses are continually faced with new and ever-evolving risks in managing their websites.

This is especially true for large organizations handling sensitive customer data, financial transactions, or proprietary information.

Overlooking security or mismanaging it can lead to costly data breaches, system vulnerabilities, and a loss of consumer trust.

How Can I Tell if My Website Is Secure?

Here’s the hard pill to swallow: no website is secure by default.

When working on any website project, it is on the professionals delivering the project to ensure they have a comprehensive security plan in place.

This helps to prevent attacks, prioritise data security, and continually update procedures.

If you’re looking at a new or an existing website and you don’t see this sort of process in place, the chances are your website isn’t secure.

How to Make Your Website Secure for a Large Project

When embarking on a complex website overhaul or digital build project, it’s crucial to have a comprehensive security strategy that spans the entire project lifecycle.

This guide outlines key steps for effectively managing security requirements when working with a digital agency.

1. 1. Risk Assessments
   2. Data Management Policies and Infrastructure
   3. Website Security Standards with Your Digital Agency
   4. Secure Development Lifecycle
   5. Penetration Testing and Endpoint Security
   6. Secure Third-Party Vendor Integrations
   7. Secure Hosting Solution and Web Infrastructure
   8. Website Access Controls, Authentication and Authorization
   9. Website Security Incident Response Plan
   10. Security Awareness Training
   11. Website Security Plugins and Tools (WordPress)
   12. Monitor, Patch and Update Security

1. Conduct a Comprehensive Risk Assessment

Begin by thoroughly evaluating your organization’s risk exposure related to corporate website security. Think about the types of data that will be collected or processed. Will the site enable e-commerce or financial transactions? Are you in a region that is subject to GDPR requirements? Is your organisation ISO27001 certified, and will the website need to comply with that standard?

Understand where vulnerabilities could exist by mapping all data flows, integrations with internal systems, and potential attack surfaces.

“The ability to detect, respond to, and prevent data breaches lies in how well a company understands its risks,” explains security expert Renault Ross at CyberSecurityTribe.com.

2. Define Data Management Policies and Infrastructure

Your risk assessment should take account of both your information security but also your wider website project risks. Using this, establish robust policies for data management, storage, transmission, and access controls. If dealing with payment data or personal identifiable information (PII), you may need to comply with standards like PCI-DSS or GDPR.

It’s important to determine if a secure customer identity and access management (CIAM) solution is required to properly authenticate users and authorize data access.

Work closely with your digital agency to ensure they have experience building the necessary data security infrastructure. Incorporate segregated databases, data encryption protocols, and principles like least-privileged access into the system design.

3. Establish Website Security Standards with Your Digital Agency

From the outset, align with your digital agency partner on security standards, benchmarks, and responsibilities during the development process.

Bodies like OWASP and the NCSC provide robust guidance and frameworks for corporate website security that should be contractually stipulated where necessary.

Ensure developers will conduct risk analysis, input validation, authentication checks, session management, and other security activities within the agreed workflows.

4. Implement Secure Development Lifecycle Practices

As part of working with your agency, it is important that you demand secure coding practices are used to achieve the standard you require for your project. This might be ensuring frameworks such as the Secure Software Development Lifecycle (SSDLC) are followed throughout the project’s lifecycle.

This includes security reviews during the design phase, secure coding and version control, continuous integration and security testing. Security should be baked into every stage of the project’s development – not tacked on at the end.

Emil Sayegh, founder of web hosting provider Ntirety, writes on Forbes, “By building security into products and services from the outset, companies can demonstrate that they take cybersecurity seriously and are committed to protecting customer data.” The more planning that is put into security throughout the design and development process, the more robust the solution will be.

5. Perform Regular Penetration Testing and Endpoint Security Audits

To identify security vulnerabilities before they can be exploited, make penetration testing and security auditing a recurring step, scheduled to take place on a regular schedule.

Work with specialized third-party cybersecurity firms to conduct comprehensive pen tests that simulate real-world attacks across your corporate website, APIs, networks, devices and more. Your website security teams and developers can then triage their findings to rapidly remediate urgent flaws and backlog others.

6. Secure Third-Party Vendor Integrations

If your website integrates with CRMs, marketing automation tools, analytics platforms or other third-party services, each represents a potential security hole.

Apply the same scrutiny in vetting a vendor’s security practices, access controls and data policies as you do for your own systems. Establish security requirements, access limitations and monitoring checkpoints in contracts.

Data breaches can cost organisations millions, so auditing each of these platforms’ security is essential. For some corporate websites, we have integrated CRMs via scripting tags as opposed to allowing contact forms to submit directly. This reduces the potential vulnerability of internal systems considerably.
 
 

7. Choose a Secure Hosting Solution and Web Infrastructure

The servers, networks and infrastructure powering your website are equally important from a security perspective. Work with your digital agency and IT teams to select a hosting provider that offers robust physical and network security – DDoS mitigation, firewalls, data encryption, WAF’s etc. Define requirements for secure VPNs, SFTP and other access gateways too.

We favour WPEngine, an enterprise WordPress host with scalable infrastructure and strong security principles. With WordPress, using insecure plugins can open up vulnerabilities, so WPEngine vets all WordPress plugins before allowing their installation, verifying they maintain the strongest security principles.

8. Implement Website Access Controls, Authentication and Authorization

Based on your defined data policies, properly configure who can access what website components or data through authentication and authorization controls.

This could include role-based limitations, multi-factor authentication requirements, IP whitelisting and more – tailored appropriately to the risk level of the data/systems.

Human beings are the weakest link in any secure system. Keep the minimum possible number of admin, editor and subscriber users active to achieve your business and marketing goals. This will help you control the human factor in your corporate website security. This also ensure that these users are more likely to keep up to date with their security, including using 2FA (Two-Factor Authentication) to maximise their login security.

9. Develop a Website Security Incident Response Plan

Even with rigorous security measures, the possibility of incidents like breaches or defacements can never be completely eliminated.

Ensuring you have an incident response plan in place that specifies stakeholders, communication protocols, and roles for investigation and containment procedures is vital.

This allows your organization to rapidly act and minimize impacts on your website and your wider brand if an event occurs.

10. Provide Security Awareness Training

You can plan the most robust procedures imaginable, but it can all go to waste if one of your colleagues plugs in an unknown USB device out of curiosity.

By providing comprehensive and regular security awareness programs to educate employees, partners and anyone else who may interact with the website’s systems. Cover topics like identifying phishing attempts, password hygiene, preventing data exfiltration and more.

11. Leverage Website Security Plugins and Tools (WordPress)

If building on platforms like WordPress, take advantage of plugins and tools that can bolster security out-of-the-box. Options like Wordfence and Sucuri provide features like firewalls, malware scanning, security hardening and more. However, ensure your digital agency properly vets and securely configures any third-party plugins integrated.

12. Continuously Monitor, Patch and Update Security

Security is never a one-and-done effort. When making plans for your website budget, ensure that you make suitable provision either for internal or outsourced security procedures on an ongoing basis.

Plan for ongoing vulnerability monitoring across the website, CMS, plugins, applications and infrastructure. This will allow you to establish procedures to rapidly apply software patches and updates to mitigate emerging threats. Continuously assess your security posture through activities like penetration testing to find new gaps as your site evolves.

Strongest Cybersecurity Principles

Take a proactive, lifecycle approach to corporate website security when embarking on a new website initiative. This will help your organization to reduce vulnerabilities while meeting compliance obligations. Engaging a digital agency experienced in secure development, selecting the right hosting and infrastructure, and implementing monitoring processes protects your online presence from costly breaches or incidents.