Websites can be hacked, this is a bitter reality, and it is very stressful if a WordPress site gets hacked. It has a direct effect on running a website and even greater impact if you are using one to represent your business. In this article, we will discuss a systematic guide to fix a WordPress site after it is compromised.
Let’s break down what kind of impact a hacked site can have:
If your income depends on your site, you must put security on top of the list of priorities. Therefore, it is vital to have a reliable web hosting that helps protect your site and to follow some security practices. Some important things to consider while running your WordPress site are:
The best thing to do is try to prevent your site from being compromised in the first place. According to statistics, WordPress is the most likely CMS to be hacked, so let’s cover the worst-case scenario and look at what to do if your site gets hacked:
The easiest and most reliable, but costly solution is to hire a professional. They will help quickly and effectively find the heart of the issue and secure your site. However, you should keep in mind that experts are always expensive.
There’s a basic checklist you should immediately run through if you suspect that your site was compromised:
A good hosting company has experienced and skilled staff on their customer support teams to help you. While they might not be able to fix your site, they can help find any existing backups, or walk you through potential ways to restore the site.
If you have a backup of your site, you can restore it to the last uncompromised version. This can easily solve your problem. The only downside to this is the potential of losing any post-backup content or comments from your site. But on the other hand, this is the fastest way to get control of your site back.
If you have some WordPress themes or plugins, which are not active, delete them. Hackers can use compromised plugins to find a backdoor or another vulnerability.
Additionally, you should scan the website, and install a reliable plugin for security such as Sucuri Security or the Theme Authenticity Checker. After scanning, you can find the location of the vulnerability which can be in various directories or files (upload, wp-config, wp-includes, access). Once the issue is found you can:
Give administrator access to only those whom you trust with your website’s management. Go to the user section and check if any other user has administrator access, or if there are idle or unrecognized users. Be sure to delete anyone suspicious and log out all inactive users.
WordPress secret keys improve encryption and help better secure your site. If your site was breached you should:
Consider changing the login credentials (both the username and password) for your site’s infrastructure. This includes the WordPress credentials, as mentioned in the first point, and those of your MySQL database, and hosting account. Make sure to use a strong password or use a password management tool that can generate a password that is virtually impossible to brute-force.
Having your WordPress site hacked can be catastrophic for your business. That’s why it’s important to both take steps to prevent such an incident and to know what actions to take if the worst-case scenario takes place. Let’s briefly recap what you should do if your site is compromised:
We hope this guide will help keep your website safe and sound.
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