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WooCommerce is designed to provide a safe and user-friendly foundation for e-commerce websites. However, it does not automatically guard against external security threats such as hacks, brute force attacks, credit card skimmers and other malware.
Security is like an onion; leveraging multiple layers of security is crucial because, just like the diverse layers of an onion, there is no single solution that addresses every concern or threat. Instead, each layer provides its unique purpose and contributes to the overall defense of your WooCommerce website.
To protect your WooCommerce site from threats, you must take additional steps to enhance your website’s security.
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Keep your WooCommerce, WordPress core, themes, and plugins up-to-date with the latest patches to ensure you have the latest security updates and bug fixes. This reduces the chances of known vulnerabilities being exploited by attackers.
New patches shouldn’t be restricted only to your WordPress environment, however. You’ll also want to ensure your web server, PHP, and other server-side software are always up-to-date with the latest security patches and fixes too. If you’re not sure how to do that, consider coordinating with your hosting provider to ensure they regularly update server software to mitigate risk.
You will also want to consider enabling automatic updates for your software components. When new vulnerabilities are discovered in WordPress plugins, attackers waste no time in exploiting them. Websites that have auto-updates enabled are at a significantly lesser risk, but be sure to pair this with a daily backup service in the event that something breaks.
Implement strong, unique passwords for all of your accounts, including FTP, SSH, database, and login credentials. You’ll want to enforce a strong password policy for other users too — especially administrators and other privileged users.
Strong passwords help make it much more difficult for a bad actor or automated tools to brute force your website. So, consider using complex passwords with a mix of upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters.
Length is essential to creating a safe password. While most sites and tools require at least 8-10 characters, you should aim for passwords that are at least 12 characters long.
You can also implement 2FA on WordPress to help reduce the risk of someone gaining unauthorized access through your admin panel. Check out further options of securing your wp-admin administrator panel in our blog post on WordPress hardening.
Not all web hosts are created equal. Be sure to choose a reputable hosting provider that offers regular updates and security patches to ensure that servers are protected against known vulnerabilities.
A secure web host may offer robust measures to protect your website’s data and deliver better performance. This helps maintain your customers’ trust and ensures compliance with data privacy regulations.
How to choose a secure web host for WooCommerce:
You can also opt to use a virtual private server (VPS) if you want full control over your environment, but keep in mind that you’ll need to maintain your infrastructure yourself, including patching/updating your operating system and its associated components.
Install and configure an SSL certificate to encrypt data transmitted between your website and users, ensuring secure transactions and protecting sensitive customer information.
Since SSL encrypts data in transit, it’s essential for WooCommerce websites that receive or transfer sensitive payment details and personal information from checkout pages.
There are a number of reasons why installing SSL certificates on your WooCommerce website is vital to the success of your online store:
If you’re looking for step-by-step instructions, check out our guide on how to install an SSL certificate on your website.
Backups are a crucial aspect of WooCommerce security because they allow you to restore your website quickly and efficiently in the event of data loss, security breaches, or other unforeseen issues.
In the event of a security breach, such as a malware infection or hack, website backups enable you to restore your website to a clean, pre-attack state, minimizing the impact on your business and customers.
Some best practices for your WooCommerce backups include:
Restricting user privileges and practicing the principle of least privilege is a fundamental strategy in maintaining a secure WooCommerce website. By enforcing this principle, you’re ensuring that every user in your system is assigned the appropriate level of permissions and access — thus minimizing the risk of unauthorized modifications, data leaks, and potential exploitation by malicious actors.
One example of restricting user privileges is assigning a user the Customer role instead of the all-powerful Administrator or Shop Manager role, thereby limiting the user’s access to the bare minimum necessary features and functionalities specific to their needs.
Providing each user with bare minimum access also allows you to more efficiently conduct audits, monitor user activity, and maintain a clearer picture of the security status of your website. In the event of a security breach or problem, restricting user privileges makes it easier to pinpoint the source of problems — and ultimately reduces the surface area vulnerable to attacks, since bad actors too have limited access to your website’s critical assets.
Looking to tweak the capabilities of user roles in WooCommerce? You can leverage the following third-party plugins to modify roles:
Setting proper file and directory permissions is a crucial step in securing your WooCommerce website as it defines who can access, read, modify, and execute those files and directories. Restricting permissions can help you minimize the risk of unauthorized access or modifications, which could potentially compromise your webstore’s security, customer data, and overall functionality.
You’ll want to ensure that sensitive files, like wp-config.php, which contain database credentials and other critical configurations, have adequate permissions to reduce the likelihood of being exploited. For instance, setting the permission level of wp-config.php to 400 or 440 will allow only the owner of the file to read and prevent access by other server users.
To change the file permissions for wp-config using FTP, follow the steps below:
To modify permissions for multiple files and folders:
Using these steps, you can efficiently alter file permissions for your WordPress site, ensuring proper access and enhancing security.
You’ll also want to restrict the permissions for folders that store website files and documents to help safeguard the overall website structure and minimize the odds of unauthorized modifications.
Regularly monitoring and auditing your WooCommerce website for indicators of compromise (IoCs) is a crucial step to securing your online store and ensuring the safety and trust of your customers. This can help you gain critical visibility into the inner workings of your website, detect any suspicious activities, and address security vulnerabilities before they escalate into serious incidents. As a WooCommerce store owner, the last thing you want is to lose customer trust and potentially face data breaches or financial loss due to an undetected compromise.
The Sucuri scanning engine has been specifically designed to tackle the diverse range of threats that a WooCommerce website may encounter. By scanning and detecting malware and other IoCs at both the client and server levels, Sucuri’s monitoring solution covers all critical aspects of website security. With advanced website server-side scanners, Sucuri checks every file on your server for signs of malware, including backdoors, phishing pages, spam, DDoS scripts, and more. Our research-driven malware signatures help to identify the latest emerging threats, ensuring your website remains protected even as the landscape of online threats evolves.
Logs are another essential component of website security. Analyzing your website logs can help you gain insights into potential anomalies, intrusion points, and vulnerabilities that may indicate breaches or the presence of malware.
Logs are also important for maintaining user accountability, troubleshooting technical issues, and ensuring compliance with data protection regulations such as PCI-DSS and GDPR.
Set up comprehensive malware scanning and cleanup services. Our pros are here to assist you 24/7!
Nulled plugins and themes, which often have licensing restrictions modified or removed, might seem like a cost-effective way to gain access to premium functionality, however, potential savings are vastly overshadowed by the potential consequences.
Nulled software is known to be distributed and leveraged by bad actors, allowing them to steal sensitive information or inject malicious code into your site. Pirated components may also be riddled with security vulnerabilities, leaving your site exposed to potential exploitation. The lack of updates from the original developers means these problems can persist unaddressed, impacting both your site’s functionality and integrity.
In some cases, nulled plugins and themes can lead to malware infections like SEO spam, backdoors, and other unwanted or malicious software — adversely affecting your website’s credibility and search rankings and ultimately harming your online reputation. It can also cause compatibility problems with other plugins and the latest WordPress updates, breaking key functionalities.
Always opt for official themes and plugins, whether they are free or premium, or choosing custom development alternatives, will help you minimize security risks and protect your WooCommerce website from the dangers posed by nulled software.
Input validation ensures that any data entered by a user on your WooCommerce site is legitimate, follows specific formatting requirements, and does not contain any potentially harmful content. It can help prevent a variety of attacks, including SQL injections, cross-site scripting (XSS), and arbitrary file uploads, all of which can severely compromise your website’s security, functionality, and user experience.
To mitigate risk, always ensure that all user inputs, including form fields and URL parameters, are properly validated and sanitized to prevent attacks. For example, you can leverage WordPress functions like sanitize_text_field() and esc_html() to sanitize user inputs before storing them in the database.
It’s important to know who has access to the kind of information needed to process payment, such as credit card details and other personally identifiable information (PII).
Many online stores use a reputable payment gateway, but this doesn’t mean your site is off the hook when it comes to PCI compliance. Your online store will at some point generate some form of commerce, whether it’s a subscription service, goods, or services. In doing so, you will want to pay special attention to the PCI Self Assessment Requirements.
Here are some things to look for:
We recommend checking out the PCI Compliance Guide to better understand Requirement 10 of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards, which states the following:
The intent of PCI DSS Requirement 10 is to determine the “who, what, where and when” of users accessing your data processing resources.
A content security policy (CSP) is a crucial step in securing your WooCommerce website and protecting it from various cyber threats. The primary advantage of utilizing a CSP lies in its ability to control the sources of content loaded by your website, thus significantly reducing the risk of cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks and other content injection vulnerabilities. XSS attacks, among other threats, can lead to unauthorized access to sensitive data, altered website content, and harm to your site’s reputation.
By setting up a CSP, you’re essentially providing explicit instructions to the web browser, dictating the domains and types of resources the browser should allow when loading your website. This prevents malicious scripts that attackers might attempt to inject into your site from executing successfully.
For example, adding a CSP header in your website’s .htaccess file to restrict the loading of external scripts and resources is a highly recommended practice for site owners.
To prevent JavaScript with script-src:
Use script-src to prevent JavaScript from loading on your site.
Content-Security Policy:script-src 'none'
This ensures that only trusted sources can provide content to your site, safeguarding it from malicious injections and other potential security breaches.
A well-configured CSP limits the avenues through which cybercriminals can target your site, effectively protecting you and your customers’ data from harm and preserving your online reputation.
Disabling directory browsing is a crucial security measure for protecting your WooCommerce website. Directory browsing can unintentionally expose sensitive information to potential hackers if not properly configured.
By default, the webserver should have directory listing disabled, but incorrect server configurations can leave directories accessible to the public. Hackers can exploit this information to gain control of the website.
The main concern with allowing directory browsing is that it may reveal important details about your website’s themes, plugins, and configurations stored in the wp-content directory. Disabling directory browsing prevents unauthorized access to these sensitive files. There are two reliable ways to disable directory browsing in WordPress:through cPanel, or by modifying the .htaccess file.
In cPanel, you can disable indexing with the following instructions:
To disable indexing with .htaccess, add the following to your file to disable directory listings.
Options -Indexes
Restricting access to sensitive WordPress files such as .htaccess and wp-config.php is essential to preventing unauthorized access of your WooCommerce website.
To safeguard sensitive sensitive WordPress files, follow these steps:
<FilesMatch "^.*(error_log|wp-config.php|php.ini|.[hH][tT][aApP].*)$">
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
</FilesMatch>
This code will help to prevent unauthorized access to wp-config, error log, php.ini, and .htaccess files.
Remember to:
For more tips on this topic, check out our guide on how to leverage wp-config for WordPress hardening techniques and avoid data exposure.
Employing a security plugin can greatly benefit your WooCommerce site. There are a plethora of security plugins in the official WordPress plugin repository, each specifically designed to defend against targeted cyberattacks and offering features such as website scanning and web application firewalls (WAFs).
Let’s take a look at a couple popular options.
Sucuri is widely recognized for its exceptional website security products and services. Our free WordPress security plugin offers extensive control over your site’s security and a detailed overview of its various aspects. It includes features like email alerts, WordPress core integrity checks, post-hacking guides, and a remote website scanner that identifies malware, errors, outdated code, and blacklisting status.
Wordfence is a popular choice with over 4 million downloads, providing a comprehensive scanning tool that examines core files, plugin files, theme files, posts, and comments for any suspicious activity or discrepancies. Wordfence conducts scans automatically and regularly, alerting you of any detected threats or vulnerabilities and allowing you to address them promptly.
Its free version includes a website firewall and login attempt limits to counter bots and brute force attacks, as well as live traffic monitoring for real-time malicious intrusion reporting.
By utilizing security plugins like Wordfence or Sucuri, you can bolster the protection of your WooCommerce website, ensuring a safe and reliable shopping experience for your customers.
Looking for set-up instructions? Check out our getting started with the Sucuri Plugin guide.
File uploads are a common and essential feature in web applications, including WooCommerce websites. However, they can also expose the site to various risks and vulnerabilities, such as malware infections, unauthorized server access, and attacks on website visitors. To protect your WooCommerce website, it is crucial to understand the types of file upload attacks and implement security measures to defend against them.
There are four main categories of file upload attacks: file metadata attacks, file size attacks, file content attacks, and file access attacks. Each type of attack poses unique risks, and it is important to evaluate these risks and add security checks to defend against them. For example, file metadata attacks may involve tricking the system into overwriting an important configuration file, while file content attacks may involve uploading and executing malware.
To secure file uploads on your WooCommerce website, consider the following techniques:
A Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a crucial security measure for protecting a WooCommerce website from malware and various cyber threats. A WAF serves as a protective barrier between your website and incoming traffic, filtering out malicious requests and attempts to exploit vulnerabilities.
Key reasons why you should consider putting your WooCommerce site behind a WAF include:
Real-time monitoring and reporting: A WAF provides you with real-time insights into your website’s security, allowing you to identify and address potential threats promptly.
Respond quickly to threats. Take your security to the next level with the Sucuri Platform and Web Application Firewall.
It’s not uncommon for website administrators to host multiple websites. The cheapest and most convenient option is to cram them all together in the same hosting environment, however this puts them all at risk of cross-site contamination. This occurs when one website (usually a not-as-important and therefore not-as-maintained) gets infected the malware can and will spread to the other websites that it has write access to.
Your e-commerce website should be isolated into its own environment where it is less likely to be impacted by this issue.
Moreover, we also recommend using as few plugins, themes, and other software components as is absolutely necessary. This is going to reduce your potential attack surface. Software can be considered safe one day and a critical security risk the next, so the fewer plugins that you have in use on your website the less chance you have of a potential issue like this arising.
Although one of the greatest benefits of the WordPress platform is its wide array of plugins and customizations, this feature-rich environment also introduces risks as well. So only keep what you need and uninstall components that you no longer use in your environment to mitigate risk.
One aspect of WooCommerce security which differs slightly from a standard WordPress website is the existence of the checkout page, which needs to be treated with special care. Unfortunately, checkout pages are prone to being abused by bots programmed by attackers to test stolen credit cards. They will make small transactions (for example for cheap items or $1 purchases) just to confirm that the cards are still active before selling them on the black market.
The best way to prevent these automated card testing attacks is to do the following:
Both of these options make it a little bit less convenient for your customers to purchase from your store, however, this is preferable to your website being used to help facilitate credit card theft, even if the card numbers were not stolen from your website itself.
Employing multiple layers of security is key to hardening your WooCommerce environment and protecting it from hackers. Much like peeling an onion, a hacker would have to get through each layer to reach the core.
Some of the most crucial elements of WooCommerce security include SSL encryption, strong authentication, firewalls, regular patches and updates, and website monitoring. By continuously assessing and strengthening these layers, you can ensure a robust and secure shopping experience for your online store and customers.
Detecting a hack on your WooCommerce website might not be immediately apparent, as cyberattacks can manifest in various forms. However, there are some common symptoms that can indicate a potential security breach:
As a busy WooCommerce store owner, it can be challenging to constantly monitor for potential hacks. Implementing downtime monitoring can help by automatically checking if your site is up and running, alerting you if it’s not, and allowing you to take immediate action to repair and restore your online shop.
Say on top emerging website security threats with our helpful guides, email, courses, and blog content.
