Cybersecurity is an industry growing rapidly. Despite this, there is a massive skills gap—companies are demanding top talent yet there exists only a very small pool.

It is the rising incidences of cyber threats and attacks carried out by the next generation of crooks and criminals that are to blame for this.

By 2023, the cybersecurity market is expected to generate revenues worth over $250 billion and ISACA, a non-profit security advocacy group, have said that there will be a shortage of around 2 million cybersecurity professionals by the end of this year.

Your Website’s Security Is Very Important

It is not just large corporations that fall victim to attackers. In fact, it is primarily smaller start-ups and, in many cases, private individuals—these are viewed as “easy pickings” by cybercriminals who want to flex their muscles and don’t have the resources to carry out a large-scale attack on an enterprise-level corporation.

Even the smallest breach can cause a lot of damage in terms of both monetary cost and the residual impact on your SEO and search engine rankings.

Security breaches are expensive

The financial implications of a security breach can be far-reaching. First of all, you will need to pay a chunk of money out to get your site back under control and running again. In addition to this, there are the potential costs of compensating your customers or clients, the lost earnings caused due to your site’s downtime, and the costs of consulting the scarce (and expensive!) pool of cybersecurity talent to mitigate the risk of future breaches.

Your reputation takes a hit, too

Google is always watching—it uses crawler bots that monitor websites continuously and reports back to Google with their findings.

In a small-scale attack you may be able to get everything back under control and squared away before Google notices, however, in a bigger attack that lasts for a prolonged period of time, Google is going to find out. This has a negative impact on your SEO and search rankings; your site will be “marked” as hacked and Google won’t be keen to direct traffic to it until everything is fixed.

Even the best website developer in Birmingham can do nothing to help your SEO if this happens!

Taking Proactive Steps in Securing Your Site

You don’t need to spend tens or hundreds of thousands on top cybersecurity talent and the next-generation of cybersecurity software to stay safe.

How you secure your site depends on how you operate it, though. Chances are that you are using a CMS such as WordPress and keeping your WordPress site safe is often simply a case of ensuring the CMS is kept up-to-date with the latest security patches and plugins.

CMS updates may be annoying, but they are necessary to mitigate the chances of being successfully attacked. Additionally, pay attention to what plugins you are using—it is often the case that hackers find their way in through an unscrupulous plugin that was easy to compromise.

When using a CMS, it is always a good idea to consult top web developers in Birmingham to make sure everything is properly configured, deployed, and kept safe.