Help! My WordPress site was hacked!

Over the last several years we have seen a significant increase in website hacking. And with open source products like WordPress where programmers (hackers) know the product inside and out they look for holes constantly to get in and cause chaos.

Why was my website hacked you ask? It is not personal. Hackers are merciless and no one is really safe. We often tell clients if they can hack the United States Government or large banks who spend millions upon millions to protect their websites, then a hacker can get into your site. Some hackers simply do it for fun, others are mining for personal information, credit cards, bank info etc., others just want to inject code that directs people to “paid” links that most likely the hacker gets paid for via clicks or was paid to plant them into your website.

So how do you stop them? There are many tools that can be used and security plugins that can be used to help “deter” them enough to move on some where else. We recommend clients select a monthly maintenance plan that includes monthly updates of wordpress and the plugins running the site. Scanning the site monthly for issues also helps identify potential issues. there are also paid security service plugins that can significantly help, especially if you are really being targeted.

I need help right now! Call us! We look out for the small guys and we can assess the situation and help you with a game plan to recover access to your site, clean your site of malicious code, create a maintenance plan to help protect your site and put a recovery plan into place with the use of site backups to remote locations etc.

How much maintenance time do you need to protect my site? We recommend any where from 8 hours – 10 hours per month but it can depend on the size of your site. That is really a minimal amount of time to help protect your site and is well worth it.