7 Ways to Secure your Shopify Store

Secure your Shopify Store

Last updated - September 1, 2022

A peaceful and relaxing life is all we wish for, and this has really become possible in the 21st Century. You can buy anything you like from the Shopify store and don’t even have to move an inch. On the other hand, anyone who has an idea, competence, and resources can even have their own Shopify store as well.

According to Shopify Statistics, an average Shopify store made around $72 per customer in the year 2020, and this rate elevated in 2021. This caught the attention of many people, and the number of customers increased, and many new Shopify Stores were initiated. You need to look for many things if you own a Shopify store. The most vital thing is to know if your Shopify store is secure or not.

What might happen if your Shopify store isn’t secure?

No one can be sure about the security measures for the World Wide Web, but we can’t leave the turkey on the table. Not only the businesses worth millions and billions are targeted, but even the smaller ones are. Everyone needs to be aware of the risks. Once the prime target leaves a single breach in the Shopify store cybersecurity, they can affect you more than you can imagine.

There are risks of losing data like account details, customers’ information, images of things available in-store, personal data, and many other things that you have saved as confidential data. The only way to reduce the chances of a security breach is to take some precautionary measures before anything happens.

Is your Shopify store secure?

No doubt that the Shopify platform grants you amazing facilities and even has great checks on security, but are they enough? This is really a matter of concern because even the biggest names like Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Uber, etc., have faced a data leak which definitely affected their fame. Your Shopify store might not be making millions of dollars, but the hackers are always looking for easy prey.

Secure your Shopify Store

No matter how much a company tries but when it comes to web-based things and availability to millions of users, the risk of hacking is always there. However, no need to worry because we can state some easy and undemanding ways to make your Shopify store more secure than ever.

Seven measures you must take for a safe Shopify store

These are some of the most important things that must be kept in mind if you have a Shopify store.

Keep Your Eyes On Who Has Access

Many people have admittance to different areas of the store. There are chances that they intentionally or unintentionally become the reason for your tension. One of the best things the Shopify store offers you is that you get to decide who can access what at every point. The restrictions can be made easily within a few clicks. It’s not just about trust; being an owner of a Shopify store, you must keep the ingression to confidential things to yourself. With the time and expansion of your business, you can easily permit anyone you wish.

On the other hand, there are various applications that people usually download to make matters like transactions and notifications easy. However, these applications are likely to bring bugs, viruses and can even cause damage to the firewall. To stay protected, you must limit the access of these applications to the store.

Make Sure Your Internet Connection Is Safe

Even though you take all the necessary measures but if you are likely to use the internet connection at any place like plane, café, mall, office, subway, etc., then there are quite a many chances for you to attract hackers your way. The internet connections that are open to the public are ideal for hackers. With the help of that internet connection, they can easily run through all your files and data in a matter of seconds.

Thinking about what’s the way out? Have a trusted VPN. A Virtual Private Network (VPN) can save your life and the Shopify store no matter from where ever you run it. Moreover, you can allow people living around the globe working as an employee for you to use the same VPN. This way, the hackers won’t be able to breach through at least due to any unsafe public Wifi.

Check Your SSL Settings

We all know that Shopify already gives every store the default access to SSL certificates. This certificate enables every store to have traffic that wouldn’t carry any threats. Usually, the traffic is directed through HTTP, but Shopify has made things more unshakeable with the SSL certificate that allows the traffic only through HTTPS. This way, the record of all the IP addresses is maintained and can be used if anybody tries to break through the cyber breaches.

Having A Backup Is Necessary

What if you don’t have any cyber threats, but you end up losing every information of your Shopify store like images, posts, comments, reviews, blogs? Yes, this can truly happen and has happened to many people. Make sure you not only rely on the cloud networking and backup service of Shopify but also have your own data backup as well. There are many applications available that can provide you with fool-proof backup at different rates. You can buy any of them according to your choice, need, and budget.

Secure your Shopify Store

Password Must Not Let Any Hacker Pass

A password must be considered one of the most vital things for the Shopify store. It is better not to share your Shopify store password with anyone. This way, you’d be more tension-free of all the chaos anybody can create if they know or guess your password. When we first made our Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media accounts, we made sure they had the easiest passwords so that we could remember. Consequently, our IDs got hacked effortlessly. Contrastingly, if we chose passwords as hard as we could, then we ended up forgetting them.

Those were just social media IDs, but the Shopify store password should be dearer than life. There are many password-managing applications that can aid you in this regard. Download one of the most trusted ones, and you don’t have to worry about passwords anymore.

Two Factor Authentication

Suppose you just couldn’t save your Shopify store from the hacker with a tough password, or your password got leaked due to some reason. What would you do then? The hackers and cyberattacks are way more advanced than you think, and most businesses have high budgets to save themselves. You can solve the problem with a built-in feature in Shopify. This feature is known as Two-Way Verification. This option allows the users to not only open their account with their username and passwords but your authenticity is checked by another code that would occur on your personal device.

By updating and permitting this feature to work in your account, there would be less to no chances of hacking. Only the most efficient hackers would be able to pass through the Two Factor Authentication, but we won’t give them any chances.

Protect Against Fraud

The “Protect Against Fraud” is another security option available to Shopify Plus holders. This feature allows you to dive deeper into the customer information and can get a deep check to avoid risk and fraud. This feature would be helpful as you can filter the frauds which might be hiding behind as a customer. If you have Shopify Plus, this option is vital, and you must enable it immediately.

Assets Verification For Security

Any asset on your Shopify store that is not hosted over HTTPS should be considered insecure. These assets include images, videos, fonts, or other similar media items that are not hosted on Shopify. Shopify handles all the responsibility of securing your assets online so you can easily host them through HTTPS.

If you still need to host your assets outside Shopify you should consider the following steps. 

  • Use a dedicated server that uses HTTPS to host your assets. 
  • Check that the service provider where you host your videos or other media items publish over HTTPS.

TLS Certificate

TLS or Transport Layer Security enhances the network security between the client and the server to transmit encrypted messages and ensure a reliable connection. TLS security prevents malicious imposters between the web browser and the client and ensures data integrity by transmitting it over a secure medium without any potential losses. If your store handles credit transactions TLS provides added security to the user’s financial data.

All the domains are provided free TLS certificates on Shopify. In the following instances, a TLS certificate is issued automatically.

All the assets are hosted on the .myshopify.com domain on Shopify.

  • When you buy a new domain on Shopify or transfer an existing domain to Shopify.
  • You will receive a TLS certificate automatically when you connect your third-party domain to Shopify, by changing A record and CNAME record and redirecting it to Shopify. It might take up to 48 hours for changes to take effect and issue a TLS certificate.

Code Management Standards

If you are planning to customize your theme code you should consider code management standards. You can use Git or a free Shopify tool such as Theme Kit

Use this app to restrict access to your theme code and create unlimited passwords. These passwords can be shared using a secure link that expires in 7 days or after it’s viewed. You can set different passwords for developers, track the developers using the integrated monitoring tool and revoke access with one single click.

Lock Restricted Content

Locking or giving members-only access to your customers, investors, or admins to certain elements of your website enhances the security of your Shopify store. You can use the Locksmith app on the Shopify app store to prevent access to private items, content, set registration requirements, add customer tags, etc. 

Protect Original Content

To protect your store’s original content you can use the Disable right-click on the app to prevent customers from downloading any images, disable the copy and paste option, save as option to avoid content duplication. The basic version of the app works for free without any coding, you can simply install the app and toggle setting configuration options from the dashboard.

Protect Your Shopify Account Against Phishing

Phishing refers to identity theft scams that involve phony website links, messages or links. The scammer’s goal is to gain access to your bank account credentials or other sensitive information. Phishing emails might ask you to visit a link, download a file or open attachments so you should be aware of all such scams or phishing emails.

If you come across any of the following warning signs you should immediately report and block the sender’s email or contact number.

  • You receive business messages from a personal account.
  • Misspellings in the text, poor grammar, and multiple style variations.
  • Alarming or over exciting tone of the sender.
  • Suspicious URLs

For additional security and to protect yourself from phishing you should only connect with the websites that use HTTPS and open attachments or links that you were already expecting.

Be PCI Compliant with Shopify

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard or PCI DSS was created to reduce fraud around payment data. This standard was specifically created for organizations that handle credit and debit card transactions. 

If you accept online payments through Visa, Mastercard, American Express, etc., your software and hosting provider should be PCI compliant. All Shopify stores are automatically provided Level 1 PCI certification by default. You can also display a PCI security badge on your Shopify store to build trust with your customers.

Further reading

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