Best Ways to Improve Your Front Door Security

The front door to your home is commonly the most accessed entry point for intruders. They will often kick it open to gain entry into your house. That means securing your front door is an important measure you can take to help reduce the risk of burglary and make your home impenetrable.

Here are some highly effective ways that you can apply to improve your front door security.

1. Install & Upgrade Door Lock
2. Use Solid Core Doors
3. Install Strike Plate
4. Reinforce Your Door Hinges
5. Install a Security Door

Install & Upgrade Door Lock

Every front door needs a lock and choosing the best lock is paramount in improving home security. If the door lock suffers from wear and tear, you might want to look for a new and more secure door lock.

Adding a high-quality deadbolt or deadlatch will improve your door security. The locks are durable and made from a strong metal that could better prevent force entries, such as kick-ins. These locks opened using a key or thumb turn, making it impossible to force open using a knife blade or credit card.

For more security, you could install a one-sided deadbolt that can only be opened from the inside. This lock doesn’t have a keyhole on the outside, and can only be locked and unlocked from the inside. Therefore it’s not possible to pick the lock from the outside.

Five lever mortice lock is another more secure door lock. In the lever tumbler lock, the key moves a series of levers that allow the bolt to move in and out of the door. There are 2, 3 or 5 lever mortice locks. Door locks with more levers are more secure and harder to break into by picking the lock.

If you want to improve the front door security, upgrade to a door with a multi-point locking system. The door has three locking points, secured at the top, middle and bottom of a jamb. Multi-point locks have three latching bolts and a separate deadbolt. This provides an increased level of security over traditional single-point locks.

Nakamura2828 at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Use Solid Core Doors

Your exterior entry doors must be solid. Hollow core doors are a security threat and more vulnerable to force attacks such as when being kicked in. A solid wood door will hold up far better, and it will take a chopping axe to break in, which is what firefighters need to break in and save your life. If your solid door has windows, the windows have to be reinforced.

Install Strike Plate

A strike plate is a piece of metal that is attached to your door jamb. When the door closes, the bolt extends into and is held by the hole in the strike plate.

A well made, well-attached striker plate with a good quality deadbolt has a higher chance to withstand a forced entry attack.

Reinforce your striker plate by replacing the screws in the metal plate with long screws that are at least 75mm. Longer anchor screws will go all the way into the door frame, making it harder to kick in.

The strike plate can also be reinforced by using a long metal plate, which has places for more screws. More screws securely attaching the strike plate will require greater effort to destroy it.

Another option is to use a box strike plate. It’s a strike plate with a cup instead of a hole. The cup catches the bolt and holds it in place much stronger than a hole on the metal plate.

Reinforce Your Door Hinges

One way to improve door security is to hide your hinges. Entry doors usually have inward-facing hinges, where the door opens inward instead of outward. Those hinges are inaccessible to someone trying to break in.

If the door opens outward, the hinges are exposed to anyone outside. Burglars can remove the hinge pins and lift the door out. To secure outswing doors, install hinge bolts below and above the hinges. Hinge bolts are small metal bolts that are screwed to the hinge side of the door. When the door is closed, the bolts will sit in the holes in the door frame jamb. So even if the hinge pins are removed, the hinge bolts will prevent the crooks from pulling the door out. Hinge bolts also make your front door more resistant to kick-ins.

Next, reinforce your door hinges with screws that are at least 75mm long. The longer screws will secure the hinges firmly in the door and the door frame.

Install a Security Door

A security door adds an extra barrier to your property. This increases the level of your home security. These doors designed with security in mind, are made of steel that is more difficult to destroy or break into than your average door. Security doors typically have secure non-removable hinges with a strong frame.

The security doors will help deter thieves from targeting your house because it’s an obstacle that increases the time it takes for someone to get into your house.

As you can see, there are many ways to make your front door more secure. These steps will be more effective in helping keep out robbers or those who may wish harm to you or your loved ones.

If you want to learn more about increasing your front door security, contact us today. Our professional locksmiths in Perth and security experts will be able to offer the best advice and guidance to suit your needs.