If the sight of the “updates available” notification in your WordPress dashboard fills you with a sense of dread, you’re not alone.

Updating your WordPress plugins and themes or WooCommerce and its extensions can sometimes be an easy process — just a few seconds of waiting and you’re set. But it can also involve backups, testing, additional updates, and even support requests. Basically, the hassles no one likes.

But avoiding or putting off these occasional hassles can put your site at risk, and even potentially affect your customers. So while you may not always like to go through the process of keeping your WooCommerce store 100% updated, there are many reasons to do it.

Let’s take a look at why it’s important to update your store in a timely manner, starting with some background on why we update WooCommerce and its extensions in the first place.

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As we covered in this introduction to WooCommerce security, creating the groundwork for a safe, well-protected store only takes a few steps. But most of the tips we offered are things you’d do before launching your store, or perhaps immediately after.

Security isn’t something you can think about once and never again. If you don’t keep your store up-to-date, pay attention to security trends, or harden your defenses as you grow and scale, you could be putting yourself in a very vulnerable position… and also putting your customers at risk.

Let’s explore a few more ways that you can secure your store post launch.

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While security measures are built into WordPress and WooCommerce out of the box, there are a few basic things new store owners should be doing to keep their customers, team, and data safe in the event of those worst-case scenarios.

Here are the seven things all new WooCommerce store owners should do first.

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Part of the process of starting an online store is finding a way to secure the experience for your shoppers. You want your potential customers to feel safe, of course, and to know that their data isn’t going to fall into the wrong hands.

If you’re new to eCommerce, you might have heard some chatter about SSL certificates or HTTPS as part of this security process. And you might be utterly confused by it. Relax — that’s normal, and we can help.

SSL sounds like a complicated topic, but once you understand the premise and why your store might need it, it’s not something you’ll have to spend any time worrying about. In fact, for most store owners, you can get a certificate to add SSL to your store in just a few minutes.

Let’s go over what SSL is, why you might need it, and how you can go about getting a certificate for your store. At the end of this post, your confusion should be gone, and you should be even more prepared to start selling online.

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