Although WooCommerce is not as widely used as Shopify or Amazon, it’s growing rapidly and accounts for 15% of online stores. This means that securing your WooCommerce store is more important than ever before. WooCommerce extends the functionality of WordPress to help you sell products on your website.
The benefits are obvious — you can add a variety of different products without learning how to code or buying third-party software and services. However, this also brings with it some challenges that need addressing if you want to keep your customers safe from hackers, scammers, and spammers.
We’ve outlined five tips below that can help secure your WooCommerce store in 2023 by strengthening user authentication, testing for vulnerabilities, protecting payment gateways from malicious attacks, eliminating phishing attempts, and more:
Create Strong User Authentication
Strong user authentication is the most important security step you can take. With strong authentication, customers must provide a set of credentials — like a phone number or email address — before they can log in to your WooCommerce store. The added layer of authentication means that hackers can’t just log into your WordPress site and take over their account.
The most popular authentication method for e-commerce sites is either an email address or a phone number. Email address is a simple way to authenticate a customer to make sure that they are who they say they are. However, attackers are getting better at stealing email addresses, so phone numbers are better now.
In fact, in many cases, an attacker can’t even try to log in without having access to a user’s phone number. Other ways of authenticating customers include using a social media account, using Google authenticator for 2FA, or using an app like Duo.
Test for Vulnerabilities
When you are building a website, the most important thing you can do is getting it right. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t continually test your website for vulnerabilities. A vulnerability is a weakness in your website that can be exploited by hackers to gain unauthorized access to your website.
A good way to test for vulnerabilities is to use a vulnerability scanner. There are many free and paid services that scan your website and look for potential security issues. If you see any, you can fix them before they get worse. A vulnerability scanner can be particularly useful if you have a team of developers working on your site. A developer may not see all the issues that a scanner sees.
Protect Payment Gateways from Malicious Attacks
When someone buys something from your WooCommerce store, their credit card information is sent to the merchant processor along with the details of the transaction, like the cardholder’s name, address, and payment method. However, merchant processors can’t always protect this data from being stolen by hackers.
The most likely way for hackers to get at this information is by attacking the merchant’s payment gateway. Payment gateways are the gateway between you and the payment processors. They are like the front door to your house, and they need to be protected. A hacker can get into your house by breaking into the front door — so it’s important to secure it with a doorstop. A doorstop is something that blocks the door from being opened from the inside.
Payment gateways can be attacked from three main directions: DNS, HTTP, and HTTPS. When you sign up for a payment gateway, you must specify the hostnames or IP addresses associated with that gateway. The problem is that hackers can change these hostnames or IP addresses in order to redirect your customers’ transactions to their own accounts.
Hackers can also try to steal your customers’ information directly by making requests to the payment gateway. This can be done by hacking the website that is managing the payment gateway, or they can just set up a website that looks exactly like the website that you’re using and send fake requests to your payment gateway.
Eliminate Phishing Attempts
Phishing is the practice of trying to trick someone into giving up their account details. Phishing attempts can take many forms, such as fake sites that look exactly like the real thing, emails with links in them, fake messages on social media, and more. In some cases, hackers try to trick you into logging into a fake website that looks just like your own by using fake login forms.
One of the best ways to prevent phishing attacks is to use two-factor authentication (2FA). This means that whenever a customer tries to log in to their account, they will have to enter their login and a second code, like a text message or a one-time PIN number, before they can log in. If you don’t have a 2FA system in place, your customers’ account information is vulnerable to phishing attempts.
Hackers will try to log into your account by posing as a customer, changing the products they bought, and charging them for products that they never ordered or didn’t authorize.
Add SSL/TLS Certificate
SSL/TLS is the encryption that protects your WooCommerce website over the internet. This should always be enabled to protect the data that is sent between your server and your customers. What happens is that when a potential customer lands on your website, their browser will automatically make a request to your hostname, which will then redirect the browser to your hostname over the internet.
But if your hostname is not protected by SSL/TLS, then the browser will send your server’s unencrypted data, like the visitor’s IP address and other information, to the hacker.
There are several SSL and TLS certificate types and the providers in the industry. You can pick the suitable one to protect your website and users’ data while transmitting them web browser to servers. You can choose cheap wildcard SSL certificate from cheapSSLweb.com which is specially designed to protect ecommerce websites and their data. It includes unlimited server license so you can install it on multiple servers and protect unlimited subdomains of the primary domain.
Cheap SSL Certificate from CheapSSLweb.com is useful for protecting the website from being accessed by hackers over the internet. It includes high-end 256-bit encryption algorithm with a 2048-bit key which is almost impossible to crack in the Internet World. Therefore, it is much more difficult for someone to access your website if it has SSL/TLS protection.
Bottom Line
WordPress e-commerce stores are a popular choice for online businesses. But securing such a site is important — especially as hackers are getting more sophisticated and are targeting WooCommerce stores more than ever before. These best practices will help you keep your WooCommerce store safe and secure in 2023.