What Web Designers Need to Know About Cybersecurity?

Web designers mostly focus on the aesthetic aspects and the marketing power of the websites they design; this is understandable. After all, they want to provide the best customer experience they can so the website brings in more traffic, it’s basically the essence of web design. But you can’t pass on cybersecurity.

The security aspect is a crucial one for every website on the internet, especially for the ones that store client information. By being one of the first lines of defense, web designers should take cybersecurity into account when designing and updating webpages. If you want to design a great but equally secure website, see the tips below.

📌 Web Design Cybersecurity Threats

Let’s first start with the threats that websites are facing today. You first need to understand the risks you are facing as a web designer so you can take appropriate precautions. Knowing these threats will make you instantly better at fighting the hackers as you’ll be studying your enemy.

⚡ 1. Data Exposure

Sensitive data is unfortunately becoming a victim of malicious users every day. For the protection of the company data, and more importantly, customers’ sensitive information, you need to implement security policies. Web designers need to be aware of data exposure and close every gap they can find on their websites.

⚡ 2. Insecure codes and components

As a web designer, perhaps one of the best things to include in your projects is ready-to-use codes and components. But be wary, some of these codes might have significant security vulnerabilities and instantly draw the attention of cybercriminals to your website. Always look for better options, better plugins, and components; both in terms of design and cybersecurity.

⚡ 3. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks

Cross-site Scripting (XSS) attacks are one of the main enemies of websites today. This attack happens when malicious users send a hidden, malicious executable link to a website in the form of a link or other content, and promoting the end-user to click it. One of the worst things about this attack is that your end-user will not understand that it might be a malicious source. By executing this script, the sensitive data on your website might be accessible by these hackers.

⚡ 4. Relying on passwords only

Passwords are now one of the least secure ways of ensuring authorized users log in. They are significantly easier to be compromised when compared to other authentication methods, and most of the time, passwords are too weak to protect a user’s account. In the worst-case scenario, if you have remote team members accessing the website and signing in, their passwords will be stolen and you won’t have an idea until it’s too late. You need to up your authentication methods today.

📌 Cybersecurity Best Practices for Web Designers

Now we know what threats web designers are facing with their websites. The good thing is that we have a variety of practices that will cover our website against these malicious attacks and risks. To make sure you are all set with them, we have created a list of best practices you should know.

✅ 1. Adopt Zero Trust security

Remember when we mentioned risks with user authentication and the threats that emerged

from weak passwords? Zero Trust security is your answer to those risks as this cybersecurity approach adopts the principle of “never trust, always verify.”

This means that even the users within a network are being authenticated repeatedly with more secure methods than weak passwords. Zero Trust security is usually implemented along with authentication methods such as MFA to ensure users can verify who they are.

It’s also a great thing to implement thanks to the ability to govern how much access users have on your network. This way, you will be eliminating almost all internal threats to your website.

✅ 2. Always have backup

As a web designer, you need to face the reality of the risk of a cyberattack, even if you are doing everything correctly. No app or website is 100% secured from cyber attacks, but what makes the difference is the ability to respond and recover from these potential attacks.

Having a backup of your data at all times is a great starting point. As a web designer, you can simply implement a plugin to do this task for you. When you have an up-to-date backup of your website and all the content within, you will recover from most attacks in no time and minimize the lost data.

✅ 3. Ensure secure connection

Ensuring a secure connection from and to your website is without a doubt one of the first things you need to do. As we mentioned in the first part of this article, data exposure is a real risk, and it usually arises from insecure connections.

Consider using a VPN when you connect to your network and website and especially when you are working remotely to update a webpage. VPNs will encrypt the communication between your device and the website, making it almost impossible to track. Remember that encryption is the way to protect data when it travels, and data is at the most risk when traveling.

✅ 4. Use Secure Socket Layer (SSL)

SSL is one of the things that you simply cannot ignore. Most websites are using SSL and for a good reason; it’s the best way to protect sensitive information on a website by making them unreadable to malicious users.

It’s especially a must if you receive highly sensitive data such as credit card information since without an SSL certificate, you are exposing your clients to online hackers, which will definitely damage the trust of your audience. You can either just opt for a provider with built-in SSL right from the start, or then acquire an SSL certificate. No matter how, this is a must.

📌 Conclusion

If you are a web designer, you need to be aware of the cybersecurity risks that your website is facing every day. Securing websites is as important as making them look great and providing a great user experience. Keep in mind that recovering from a bad incident is much more challenging than preventing it from happening, so it is time to take action and implement precautions to minimize risks.

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