WordPress is an excellent platform for creating any type of websites like business, online store, or blogging. It is free and easy to use, but it can be a little worrisome if your blog was hacked.
There are millions of WordPress sites on the internet, and it is not hard to see what are the reasons for hacking a WordPress site.
However, if your site was hacked by an advanced hacker or malware-infected without you knowing, then there is some work that needs doing in order for things to be back to normal.
There are a few basic things you need to do first if your blog has been hacked:
- Contact the hosting provider of the site and let them know about the problem as soon as possible so they can take action on their end before it becomes worse.
- Make sure all passwords have been changed, including for email accounts.
- Run an anti-malware scan.
Also, if you are not sure how or where to start, contact a Tech Support Guru for help. They can take care of everything. In this case, you have to pay a little amount.
In this article, I am going to talk about what you should do if your blog was hacked and more related things.
How Can You Know If Your WordPress Site Is Hacked?
There are several ways to check if your WordPress site has been hacked.
If you are not a developer, the easiest way to check is by going to Google and searching “Is my website hacked”. You will get many tools that will tell you if your site has been hacked.
If that doesn’t work, head over to Sucuri SiteCheck (or another similar service) and type in the URL of your blog into their search bar so they can scan it for you.
Also, below are the lists of how can you know your WordPress site is hacked.
- The site may be slow to load.
- The content of the pages might not match what you were expecting when you first visited that page on your blog or website.
- You might find that you are logged out of WordPress, even though you know the password.
- The URL for your blog post or website may have changed to another url.
- You might notice that the content of your post or page has been changed.
- You may seem a landing page on a site that’s not yours.
- You may see additional ads, popups, or pop unders on your website.
- Your important data such as private messages might be viewable by other people.
How To Fix Hacked WordPress Site
You are probably feeling a little panicked right now. Your site is down, you can’t access it and all your posts are gone! You’re thinking “How am I going to fix this? Is my blog dead?”
Don’t worry – there’s plenty of ways that you can still get everything back up and running in no time with these tutorials so you can get back to blogging!
(1) Check With Your Hosting Company
To fix your WordPress site after hacking, you should first contact your hosting company. You will need to know which type of account (shared, VPS, or Dedicated) you have before they can help.
Some hosting providers offer this solution for free while others charge a one-time fee. But I like a few hosting that offers to remove any infected file or malware-free of cost.
One of the best hostings is Kinsta or Flywheel that offers free of cost to remove viruses or any files.
However, If you are using one of the hosting providers, it will be easy for them to solve this issue. You can use any WordPress-managed hosting to solve this critical condition.
Once your site has been restored, it is time to change all of your passwords including those from other accounts outside WordPress since they might have been compromised too.
(2) Change Your Password
Next thing you should change your password. If hackers have been able to get into your site, they have probably logged in as you and changed your login information.
That means they can just log back in again when things are fixed and everything’s ruined all over again.
So make sure that the person who hacked it doesn’t stay in, by changing your password.
(3) Check User Permissions
Hackers often try to use a compromised email login and password to access WordPress accounts, so make sure you only have one!
Once you have changed your login credentials, go through all user permissions on the site again from top to bottom.
Also, if you have multiple admin access levels, you will need to change those too.
Most people use admin-level accounts for WordPress sites. So it is a good idea to assign new passwords and delete any old ones that are in there. This is especially important if your blog was hacked because of login credentials.
(4) Malware Scanning and Removal
Check for any malware on your site that may have been installed by the hacker. Also, you should check logs on your server. If you find something wrong, then it is time to contact a professional.
If nothing was found with that method, try checking for any changes in content or layout of your site and check all links if they are broken.
Afterward, scan your blog for spam comments. Make sure those are gone too!
A quick way to ensure everything is okay is by installing a WordPress security plugin that will help keep hackers out.
It is very important not only that a security plugin prevents vulnerabilities but also helps protect against brute force attacks and DDoS cyber attacks too.
Meaning no one can get into your website without permission even if they know how to correctly break into WordPress blogs through specific attack methods like SQL injection.
A great way to prevent hackers from breaking into your site in the first place is by installing a security plugin like iThemes or Wordfence.
This will help to protect your site when hackers attempt to break down your website’s defenses. Even these plugins able to automatically block suspicious IP addresses for you.
Besides, if you are still struggling to keep your site safe, try switching to a different hosting service that offers better security features like SiteLock, Sucuri or hack repair.
(5) Restore Everything From A Backup
If your site has been hacked, the first thing to do is restore everything from a backup. It is important that you have your latest blog post and content backed up.
If anything were to happen (like being hacked), it will be easy for you to get back on track by restoring what has already been written.
So first make sure that you have a backup of all the content on your site, including posts and pages before proceeding. Then try to restore everything from an old backup file. Here is the guide on how to restore everything easily using a backup plugin.
Moreover, if your hosting offers auto backup daily or weekly basis, you can restore your site from the latest backup. You can take help to do this process from your hosting provider.
(6) Contact WordPress Management Service
You can contact WordPress management service to get help for removing the hacker’s code and fixing other security issues.
You can ask the site management service to take over your admin account for them so they can remove any hacked code from your website.
There are several services available online that offer this kind of assistance as well. If you are uncomfortable giving out your login information to a third party, you will not get help from them.
Tips For Hardening Your WordPress Site
There are many ways to protect your WordPress site against hacks. Here I will cover a few ways that you can do to make your site harder for hackers to get in and steal safe information from your site.
- Update: Make sure that you are always updating WordPress version so there are no vulnerabilities present on the website platform itself, as well as any plugins or themes that are installed.
- Security Keys: Use a security key to keep your account safe from hackers who try logging. You can use two-factor authantication using iThemes, WordFance or any other plugins.
- General Settings: Look at all of your general settings and ensure that they are all set to the highest level of security possible.
- Backup: Make sure you have backups in place at all times so if something happens, you can get back up and running as soon as possible! BackupBuddy can help with this and other maintenance tasks like updating themes and plugins too. So if things go wrong again, you can just restore your site and it will be back to normal.
- Use Security Plugin: Install a security plugin to protect your site from malicious attacks. You can use iThemes Security, Wordfence Security or Jetpack.
- Utilize Antivirus: Utilize antivirus software on all devices and computers that you are using, along with any other important files like pictures or PDFs of content.
In Conclusion
In this article, you learned about what to do if your site is hacked. You should change all of the passwords on any account associated with your hacked site and also run an antivirus scanner for it as well.
Once you have done those steps, then just monitor everything like usual! Keep in mind that some things might be lost because there’s no way of knowing if the hacker will come back and try to do some damage.
So, just be cautious with everything that you put out on your site from now on.
I hope this article helped a little bit. Please share it with others so they can learn how to fix their site as well.
