security10 min readUpdated 2025-12-10

Website Security Tips

The internet is full of 100-item security checklists. Here are the twenty items that, if all shipped, cover roughly 90% of real-world risk for a typical business site.

The list

HTTPS everywhere; HSTS with preload; strict CSP; secure cookies; MFA on every admin account; least-privilege service accounts; automated dependency scanning; automated certificate renewal; DMARC on reject; CAA records; regular backups tested by restore; WAF on the edge; rate limiting on auth endpoints; secrets in a vault, never in code; logging that survives compromise; incident response runbook; principle of least privilege in the app; input validation server-side; output encoding; and a security.txt file so researchers can reach you.

Frequently asked questions

HTTPS, HSTS, and MFA on admin. Do those three this week.

Try it on your site

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