A website security audit examines your website’s files, core, plugins, server, and settings to identify and fix any vulnerabilities or loopholes that could expose your site to cyberattacks. These attacks can comprise your site’s functionality, appearance, performance, and reputation. It might also lead to a leak of sensitive information from you and/or visitors.
A website security audit should be performed regularly as part of your website maintenance and security strategy, keeping web application security services in mind.
In this article, we’ll show you how to perform a website security audit in 7 easy steps and recommend tools and services that might prove helpful to you.
Table of Contents
Step 1: Start a Website Security Audit by Running a Security Scan
A website security audit starts by running a security scan on your website. This is to check if your website has been blacklisted by any authorities such as Google or PhishTank. It also detects any malware, errors, or outdated software on your website.
This step will also give you a security score. Along with it some neat recommendations to improve your site’s security.
Astra Security’s Website Scanner is a free tool for this step. You can use this scanner to check your website for any security flaws remotely. Follow the steps mentioned below to scan your website and start the process of your website security audit:
Step 1: Enter your website’s URL
And done! In one step, understand the security posture of your website using Astra’s web application security services.
Step 2: Review Site Settings
Now that you know where there are vulnerabilities, you must make those flaws disappear. The next step in a website security audit is to review your site settings and ensure they are configured properly for optimal security.
Using a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress, you can access your site settings from your dashboard.
What should you review and adjust?
- Comment settings: You should moderate your comment section by filtering out spam comments and requiring approval before publishing them. You can also use web application security services plugins such as Akismet or Antispam Bee to help you out here.
- User registration settings: You should disable user registration if you do not need it or limit it to specific roles or domains. Enforce strong passwords and use two-factor authentication for all users. Here again, you can use web application security services plugins such as Limit Login Attempts Reloaded or WP 2FA to enhance the login security of your website.
- File permissions settings: Check the file permissions of your core files, plugins, and themes, and ensure that they are set up properly. The recommended file permissions are 644 for files and 755 for directories. Like other points, bonus tools for this one are File Permissions and Size Check or WP File Manager to manage your file permissions.
- Database settings: Change the default database prefix from wp_ to something more unique and random. This can prevent SQL injection attacks that target the default prefix. Plugins for this point are Change DB Prefix or WP Prefix Changer to change your database prefix.
- WordPress version settings: You should hide the WordPress version number from your site’s source code and meta tags. This can prevent third-party malicious actors from exploiting known vulnerabilities in specific versions of your CMS. You can use plugins such as Hide My WP Ghost or WP Hide & Security Enhancer to hide your WordPress version.
Step 3: Check User Accounts and Permissions
In this step of your website security audit, you need to check your website’s user accounts and permissions and ensure they are of the latest version and secure. Delete any unused or inactive accounts, especially those with administrator privileges. You should also review the roles and capabilities of each user and assign them only the minimum permissions required to perform their day-to-day activities.
For this step again, you can use plugins such as User Role Editor or Members to manage your user roles and permissions. You can also use other web application security services plugins such as User Activity Log or Simple History to monitor the actions of all users on your website.
Step 4: Perform Regular Updates
This step of a website security audit pushes you to regularly update your website’s core, plugins, themes, and software. Updates include security patches and bug fixes that can prevent hackers from exploiting known vulnerabilities on your site.
It is important to have a backup of your website before updating anything and test the updates on a staging site before applying them on your live website.
You can use plugins such as UpdraftPlus or BackupBuddy to back up your site automatically or manually. Other web application security services plugins such as Easy Updates Manager or WP Auto Updates manage updates easily.
Get professional Magento support services that provide regular updates, support, bug fixing, and maintenance of your website 24/7 to save you time and money and improve the security and performance of your website.
Step 5: Ensure your IP and Domain are secure
The next step of a website security audit is ensuring that the IP address and domain are secure and not associated with any malicious activities. Also, check if your IP address is blacklisted by any authorities or services such as Spamhaus or MX Toolbox. If it is, then take the necessary steps to ensure that it gets removed from the blacklist.
You should also check if your domain name is registered with a reputable registrar with a valid expiration date.
The tools you can use for this step are: IP Blacklist Check or Domain Blacklist Check to check the status of your IP address and domain name. You can also use tools such as Whois Lookup or Domain Tools to check the details of your domain name registration.
Step 6: Check for any plan or SSL renewals
Check for any plan or SSL renewals that are due on your website, and make sure you renew them on time. Your plan here refers to the hosting service that you use for your website. This may either be a monthly or a yearly subscription fee.
Your SSL refers to the secure socket layer certificate that encrypts the data between your website and visitors, which may have a fixed or variable validity period.
You should always keep your plan and SSL active and updated to avoid any downtime or security issues on your website.
For this as well, we have tools. You can use tools such as SSL Checker or SSL Shopper to check the status and expiration date of your SSL certificate.
Step 7: Assess Website Traffic
Now that you’ve secured your website from the backend, you should now assess your website traffic. In this step of a website security audit, look for any unusual or suspicious patterns or activities. You should monitor your website traffic regularly and analyze your visitors’ sources, locations, devices, browsers, and behaviors.
You should also look for any spikes, drops, errors, or anomalies in your traffic data.
Conclusion
There are a lot of tools to analyze a website’s traffic. We recommend Google Analytics or Jetpack to track and analyze your website traffic for this particular use case. You can also use tools like Wordfence or Sucuri to detect and block any malicious traffic or bot to your website.
A website security audit is a vital process that helps you protect your website from cyberattacks and improves its performance.
Follow seven easy steps mentioned in the article to perform a comprehensive and effective website security audit on your own.
- Run a Security Scan
- Review Site Settings
- Check User Accounts and Permissions
- Perform Regular Updates
- Ensure your IP and Domain are secure
- Check for any plan or SSL renewals
- Assess Website Traffic
