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- E-commerce, Digital Transformation
- E-commerce, Digital Transformation
How to Protect Your Shopify Plus Website from Hackers: 7 Proven Methods to Guarantee No One Steals Your Website
- Martin Harper
If you own a Shopify store, then you should be considering how to protect your store from hackers and data breaches. With SSL certificates and Shopify’s great secure hosting, you’d wonder, how do hackers manage to get into stores? What you should be thinking about is how we can stop them.
We’ve compiled a list of seven things every Shopify merchant should know when it comes to protecting your store and preventing your products from being stolen by hackers.
It’s vital that you consider the security of your Shopify store and your clients, especially if you’re running an ecommerce business. Neglecting your website’s security can have a serious impact on your company and your customers.
How does Shopify keep my website secure?
Shopify ensures that merchants and consumers are safe by requiring each store to be PCI compliant automatically. Shopify, however, is a third-party merchant. The responsibility of safeguarding your shop lies with both Shopify and you, the seller.
Shopify maintains the platform’s software infrastructure and manages disaster recovery. Your Shopify store is simply hosted by Shopify. Merchants themselves are responsible for site security, any 3rd-party applications installed and data backup.
As third-party applications are frequently targeted by hackers, some apps can put merchants in danger of data breaches, intellectual property theft, and content losses.
How can my website be affected by hackers?
The reality of being targeted by hackers is really quite awful. No matter how large your ecommerce store is, the effects of being hacked could be detrimental to the well-being of your business.
A few notable examples of large ecommerce businesses being hacked include SweetLegs, a leggings enterprise using WooCommerce that went bankrupt after losing six figures in sales during a Black Friday data breach.
Gymshark, a merchant selling sports and fitness apparel, is another company that suffered an estimated loss of over $143,000 after their Magento site went down, again on Black Friday.
International Military Antiques (IMA) was hacked shortly before switching to Shopify Plus, which led to their client’s data being targeted and captured. Their previously unfaltering reputation suffered greatly because of this. They spent thousands of dollars to restore the site to even a basic level of security, but their customers’ data had already been stolen and the damage done.
How can I protect my website from hackers?
In truth, the nature of all ecommerce stores is that you are at risk of being hacked. There’s no such thing as 100% protection but there are steps you can take to protect your business. Here are 7 things that will help you to protect your Shopify store from hackers and data breaches:
- Secure your basic store data
- Have an SSL certificate
- Tighten your account level security
- Lock restricted content
- Use automated backup
- Implement Version control for your Shopify store’s technical side
- Fraud prevention
Secure your basic store data.
Many eCommerce businesses and smaller firms forget to safeguard their hard work after they’ve built their business. It’s so simple to get pictures from the internet these days, copy and paste a perfect replica of your content as well as steal important information about an online business.
You don’t have to be a coding genius or spend hours trawling online forums to keep your website secure. It only takes a few minutes to prevent anyone from stealing your basic data, and if you don’t know where to start, you can always consult a professional.
Keep scripts to your store’s source code hidden and safe.
You can put a series of measures into place to prevent wrongdoers from stealing aspects of your data. You can turn every element on or off with the touch of a button.
Turn on right-click protection to prevent your images, copy, links and input fields etc. from being copied. It also stops anyone from being able to perform reverse image searches.
Use drag & drop protection to keep all of your store elements and images safe. This is often used in conjunction with preventing right clicks.
If you’re happy with your informative product description, you’ll want to turn off text selection and make it much more difficult for anyone to copy your wording.
As well as adding an extra layer of security for your website, you’ll prevent your products from being used in reverse image search therefore, customers and competitors can’t find the source of your products.
Tightening your account level security.
A lot of people will use the same password, or several versions of it, for nearly every account they have and, most often, with the same username and email. This means that if that information gets into the wrong hands, an attacker could gain access to any other accounts that use the same login credentials, including your website admin area.
Password vault software such as LastPass is perfect for generating strong passwords and keeping them safe. All you need to remember is the master password for the vault, and all of the generated passwords will be a jumble of letters, numbers and symbols which will always be unique.
Protect your account against phishing.
Phishing is a type of fraud that criminals use in an attempt to deceive you into downloading harmful malware onto your device or providing sensitive data. Phishing is a type of identity theft in which scammers create bogus websites and emails or other communications to acquire personal information from you.
An attacker either develops a fake website that resembles a reputable one or sends you an email that appears to be from a respected source. You can easily spot messages from a fake account or an account that has been hijacked if you know what sorts of things to look for.
A phishing email may ask you to complete the following actions or similar:
- Visit a link.
- Download a file.
- Open an attachment.
If you do any of these things, your computer or mobile device may be infected with malware. Malicious software is things such as worms, trojans, bots and viruses which allow intruders to access your personal information contained on an infected device.
Another variation of phishing is direct requests for personal information, such as bank account credentials or even a password reset request.
Make sure you have an active SSL certificate.
You need to make sure your website has an active SSL certificate. It ensures users’ data is transported securely through encrypted communication channels and protects the site from hacking attempts. Shopify encrypts sensitive data when it’s stored as well as the entire checkout process being SSL encrypted.
A simple way to check if your website has an SSL certificate is to enter your website’s URL into a browser. If SSL is enabled, you’ll see a small padlock icon and your full URL will begin with https.
Use an automated backup solution
The storage capacity of Shopify’s hosting infrastructure is second to none, and it is extremely well-architected. However, this does not prevent a member of your team from unintentionally deleting all of your website’s content or overwriting your theme.
Automated backup solutions such as AdNabu Backup and Restore App can rescue your website from any “oops” moments that may occur. You can use these to set up regular backups for just about everything contained within your website.
Preventing fraud.
Shopify Plus merchants can benefit from enhanced security features such as Shopify Flow and Fraud Protect to help them prevent fraudulent transactions. However, Shopify’s basic fraud detection solution is sufficient for most small businesses.
Keeping your website safe from hackers
The security of data is vital, regardless if you’re a B2B business or B2C, no matter what type of product you’re selling or whether or not you’re using any apps. It’s important to look after the security of your website to prevent your data, content and reputation from being stolen.
If you need help or advice with keeping your website secure, get in touch with Quickfire Digital today.
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