5 Tips for Adding Two-Factor Authentication to Your Website

The war for online safety is eternal. And a must-have security measure for any website is using 2-factor authentication to protect access to all users’ and administrators’ accounts. In this article, you will get five practical tips for adding two-factor authentication to your site.

Tip 1. Don’t reinvent the wheel, and connect with one of the existing 2FA providers

Of course, you can develop a one-time passcode verification system yourself, using an RFC 6238 standard and Google Auth app. However, there are lots of reasons why this is not the best idea.

Even when you develop the system yourself, it does not mean that it will be free:

• You will still need to spend your time and pay the developers’ salaries.
• You will spend many hours and great effort to wrap your head into the two-factor authentication mechanism and organize a reliable and protected infrastructure for your MFA server with clusters, firewalls, backups, encryption modules, other cybersecurity tools, etc. 
• Still, you cannot be 100% sure that there are no bugs in your code. It is better to order penetration testing before using a self-made security system in action, which is rather expensive.

In this case, it is more profitable to contact a company that offers a tested and certified 2-factor authentication solution, specializes in setting up 2FA, and has a pre-designed plan of action that can save you time. The quality of protection is worth the spent funds.

Moreover, professional two-factor authentication systems offer user-friendly statistics and monitoring tools and some additional security features like IP, geographic and time filters, smart identification, etc. It would be difficult to add such functions on your own.

2. Better Use a cloud-based multi-factor authentication solution

Cloud-based auth systems are especially suitable for startups and small projects. SAAS multi-factor authentication solution is a ready-to-use system developed to protect your website that doesn’t require high-priced hardware and hiring advanced professionals to set it up. It is:

• Ready-to-use. With a cloud 2FA service, you get an already configured full-fledged multi-factor authentication system at once. You don’t have to deploy infrastructure for the auth server, as it’s already set in a cloud.
• Cost-efficient. Usually, the cost for multi-factor authentication depends on the number of accounts you protect. And if you use a SAAS 2FA system, there is no limit for a minimum number of users. Moreover, some cloud two-factor auth platforms offer free tariff plans. For instance, Protectimus allows you to connect up to 10 users/tokens for free.
• Easy to integrate. It doesn’t take long to integrate a cloud 2FA solution with your website. 2FA providers usually offer a set of integration plugins, SDKs, APIs to make the integration as smooth and easy as possible.

When you use a cloud-based two-factor authentication solution, you don’t think about designing a challenging two-factor authentication software yourself, deploying the reliable infrastructure for the auth server, storing sensitive data that include token seeds and personal users’ information. Everything is ready out of the box and available at a very reasonable price.

3. Let your users choose from several OTP generation methods

Allow your users to choose from different OTP generation tools such as applications, delivery of temporary passwords via messenger chatbots, hardware tokens (maybe for an extra fee). Let everyone have the opportunity to freely choose the desired service because it can reduce irritation from 2fa token use. By the way, we don’t recommend you to activate SMS authentication because it is overpriced and not very safe.

4. Use adaptive authentication to keep your users’ nerve

This feature will help you keep people’s nerves. Adaptive authentication allows tracking the behavior and environment (the OS they use, the resolution of the monitor, etc.) of your users, asking them to enter one-time codes from the OTP authenticator only in the case of inconsistency found. 

Agree people don’t like two-factor authentication and often turn it off so as not to enter OTP passcodes while logging into their accounts. Adaptive authentication helps to overcome this problem.

5. Make using 2FA on your website advantageous for users

It’s not enough to find a 2FA authentication provider to improve your website protection. You also have to convince people to enable 2FA in their accounts.

Inform your users about the cybersecurity threats they can face online and insist on turning on two-factor authentication on your website.

Furthermore, try to offer something valuable that your users can get after connecting two-factor authentication. For instance, Epic Games gives people additional rewards and equipment slots in Fortnite for turning on 2-factor authentication.

And after a greater part of your website users turn 2FA authentication on, make it mandatory for the rest of the users.

Final word

As you can see, two-factor authentication services are convenient, especially if you use cloud-based solutions. Follow our instructions to achieve success and make your website really secure!