Let’s say that you have developed a wonderful website but if its contents are not secure, all your efforts and developing skills will go in the trash. So web developers must put their efforts into improving security along with functionality and design while developing websites. And by implementing a security checklist, you have set it on the right path.

A security checklist will keep your site safe from intruding of hackers. What’s more, secure authentication is one of the best practices to secure all your web development projects. So if you are naive and don’t know how to improve your site’s security, we have covered you.

In this article, you will get a brief knowledge about a security checklist for web developers. But before you step into this information, let’s begin with why site security is so crucial.

So, continue reading this helpful guide:

Significance of web security

You might not even have an accurate idea of how harmful a cyberattack can be. According to some rough calculations, at every 40 seconds, a cyberattack finds its way to infect a website. The hackers can hijack sensitive data of your existing website as well as new site visitors. So it’s not only sensitive data that is in danger but computers too are facing the same risk.

That’s why, to keep their site at a high position, web developers are looking for the best ways to keep their sites protected and secured. On the other hand, during cyberattacks companies usually lose huge sums of money. You would recover monetary and other harms caused by cyberattacks, but your client base will be irreversible.

**Also Read : How to protect your site from malicious intent

Bearing all these points in mind, you need to maintain a security checklist to secure all your web applications. Hence keep reading on:

A Security Checklist for Web Developers

While you are developing your client’s website, make sure to don’t overlook its security concerns. Here are the basic and standard web security checklist points, you must follow to save yourself from any trouble.

Getting an SSL certificate

The first step to secure your site is installing a Secure Sockets Layers certificate. By spending approximately $100 monthly, you can make your website protected.

In more easy terms, suppose a customer wants to place an online order on your website and shares his private information, an SSL certificate becomes your savior. How? It makes data transfer secured and protected. And when the customer shares his credit card numbers and other personal information, an SSL certificate works like a trust signal.

You can see an SSL certificate next to a website’s URL and it is displayed in the form of a padlock. And when your website does not have an SSL certificate, you will see “Not secure” text instead of a padlock.

Installing this security checklist is quite easy. Buy an SSL certificate from a reputed vendor like Comodo and follow the instructions of the SSL certificate provider to let it install. After implementing the proper redirects of your pages, verify the SSL certificate and redirects in the Google search console.

The best thing is you don’t need your company’s web developer to get this checklist item. With a little know-how of web development, you can include this checklist on your own.

Creating secure user logins

After you have installed an SSL certificate, you should generate a secure password. Not surprisingly enough, more than half of cyberattacks are due to retrieving passwords.

But when you create an ultra-strong password by using a password generator such as LastPass, you are making your website more secure than before.

Hence the second important security checklist for your site is generating a unique user login. You can also set a calendar reminder to update these security credentials on and off. By regularly updating your unique passwords, you are boosting your website security.

Applying a Web Application Firewall

After installing an SSL certificate and creating a secure user login, you need a WAF. With a Web Application Firewall, you can not only detect but also prevent hacking attacks.

A WAF is a powerful tool that monitors HTTP traffic. Hence to prevent common attacks such as SQL injections, cross-site forgery, and Cross-side scripting you should use a WAF tool. This will pave a straightforward way to a foolproof secure website.

On a simpler note, a WAF is a shield between your web application and the internet. When an end-user tries to access your site, a WAF ensures that the web client must pass through a set of pre-defined rules. In this way, by filtering and monitoring malicious activities cyberattacks can be prevented. And this is only possible when you are using a WAF tool like ModSecurity for the said job.

Maintaining a secure database

Unfortunately, it is very easy for hackers to abuse your website database. So whenever you are developing a website, pay some extra attention to put this security checklist as one of the top priorities.

It is more obvious that your web application server is storing a lot of information regarding your business and your customers. But make sure that you are only storing the information you want. At that moment treat all personal information of your clients with care and for this, you must encrypt all data that belongs to a specific user.

You can use Amazon’s AWS Aurora to secure all data. Your business must have the General Data Protection Regulation to make your site more secure for clients and end-user visitors.

Putting a Pen test

The last important point on or web security checklist says that try to hack yourself. Yes, you have read it right. By performing penetration testing or pen test, you can self-audit your web applications.

By hacking yourself, you are testing if your website has any loopholes to get attacked by hackers. Once you have done a pen test of your website, you can also run your website by beta users. In this way, you can have an idea about the functionality of your site.

By using the Open Web Application Security Project checklist to know how to check your web projects.

Conclusion:

To make your online platforms more profitable and successful, you must put infallible security to your site. Therefore, in this article, we have presented a security checklist for web developers. By keeping the above-mentioned points while developing a website, you may save yourself and your client from the hassle.

We hope that this post of ours will help you develop a more secure site as per your client’s satisfaction. Let us know if you find our post informative and useful.