This article will share some of the most common signs that your WordPress site is hacked and what you can do to clean it up.
If your website has been hacked or compromised, you should see some of these signs. These include slow load time, changes to your theme files, database inconsistencies, a security breach in your email, an unusual visitor in your Google Analytics, and/or an unusual amount of traffic.
12 Signs Your WordPress Site Is Hacked
Sudden Drop in Website Traffic
Spam Comments If you’re seeing an increasing number of spam comments in your WordPress dashboard, this is a warning sign of a compromised website. You should change all of the passwords on all of the plugins that you have installed to remove any security risks and make sure that all of the links on your website are secure before you do anything else.
Many different factors can cause a sudden drop in traffic. For instance, malware on your website may be redirecting non-logged-in visitors to spam websites. Another possibility is that Google’s safe browsing tool shows warnings to users.
Every day, Google blacklists around 10,000 websites for malware and thousands more for phishing. To protect yourself against these threats, you need to pay attention to your WordPress security.
Go to Google’s Safe Browsing tool to check your website’s safety.
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Read More: How Does WordPress Gets Hacked? Don’t Panic, Use 10 Best Step Guide To Recover.
Bad Links Added to Your Website
Some of these hacks are easy to spot. Often, these links are in the footer of your website, but sometimes they may be in other parts of your website. You can easily find and fix the backdoor to inject this data into your website.
See our guide on finding and fixing a backdoor in a hacked WordPress site.
Your Website’s Homepage is Defaced
This is the second most obvious one as it is also clearly visible on your back-end. Again, hackers tend to attack websites from the back-end so as not to draw attention away from their malicious activity.
So what can you do if your website is hacked? Hackers can deface your website and put their message there instead of the one supposed to be there. They can also send fake emails claiming to have stolen your data. These scammers will try to get you to pay a ransom.
You might be getting locked out of your WordPress website if you cannot log in to the WordPress admin area. This means that someone has deleted your account from the system. As there is no sign-in, you will not be able to change the password or reinstall the account from the login page.
There are other ways to add an administrator account, but your site will remain insecure until you find out how the hackers got into your site. Pulmonary function testing.
Failure to Send or Receive WordPress Emails
WordPress emails are usually sent via the Internet by using your web host’s Internet service. Most hosts offer email services for free. Often these email addresses are only intended to send test or temporary emails.
I have been having trouble sending or receiving WordPress emails. I guess that there is a possibility that my mail server has been hacked to send spam emails.
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Hijacked Search Results
If your search engine optimization results on your WordPress site are showing up as though someone else’s content was indexed, then your WordPress site is most likely hacked. While it might look like content from another site, it is a result of your site being hacked.
The hack has affected several sites, and many more are likely to be affected, but the hacker has released the script they used to insert the malicious code so that website owners can protect their sites against future attacks.
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Pop-ups or Pop-Under Ads on Your Website
This type of hack is when people try to make money by hijacking your website’s traffic and showing them their own spam ads. These pop-ups don’t appear for logged-in visitors or visitors accessing your website directly.
Pop-under ads may not seem to be visible to the users visiting from search engines. These are the ones that open in a new window without being noticed.
Core WordPress Files Are Changed
Your core WordPress files are changed if any one of them is modified or changed somehow. Hacked sites will often do this to hide the fact they have been hacked.
As soon as you activate this plugin, it will monitor your sites to ensure they’re not exposed to attack. It scans your site for malicious PHP code, removes it, and warns you about possible infections.
Users Are Randomly Redirected to Unknown Websites
If you find that your users are being randomly redirected to unknown websites, this means that your website may have been hacked. As this hack often does not redirect logged-in users, it can go unnoticed for a long time.
If the link does not go to your desired page but redirects visitors to a page that does not exist, this could be a sign that your server is under attack. Hackers often attempt to exploit vulnerabilities in servers by changing the content or appearance of the web pages to appear legitimate.
Unusual Activity in Server Logs
Server logs are plain text files stored on your web server. These files keep a record of all errors occurring on your server as well as all your internet traffic. You can access them from your WordPress hosting account’s cPanel dashboard under “Statistics.
These server logs can help you understand what’s going on when your website is under attack. They also contain all the IP addresses used to access your website, so you can block suspicious IP addresses.
If your website behaves poorly (crashing or unresponsive), it’s probably because it has an error. You can fix these by going to your server error log and identifying the errors you see.
Suspicious Scheduled Tasks
There’s nothing suspicious about scheduled tasks. It’s completely normal for a web server to have scheduled tasks set up. WordPress itself uses cron to set up scheduled tasks like publishing posts and deleting old comments from the trash.
Any script kiddie can exploit cron jobs to run scheduled tasks on your server without you knowing it. To learn more about cron jobs, see our guide on viewing and controlling WordPress cron jobs.
You are Unable to Login into WordPress
Hackers can delete your admin account from your WordPress website. When this happens, you won’t be able to reset your password. This means that the hackers will be able to access your WordPress dashboard without you knowing about it. 1.
If the hackers got into your website, they could have changed your database with a new password. That’s why it’s important to delete all your passwords and re-create them.
Google Chrome (or another browser) Shows A Warning When Visiting Your Website.
Google will send a warning message to the site owner if a website has malware.
If your domain was detected as having malware, spam, phishing, or social engineering activity, you would be suspended from Google Adsense. To reactivate your ads, check our blog: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/7243960.
If you’ve ever visited a website with a “404 error”, it may have meant that something is amiss, like an internal server error, or perhaps you typed the URL incorrectly.
Your Website Becomes Very Slow And Shows Error Messages
If your website becomes very slow, there is a high possibility that malware is utilizing your server resources. The pages that you will see having problems are the ones that handle the online payments. For example, your checkout, payment, login, and sign-up pages will most likely be the problem pages.
Search engine results are strange.
When search engine results are not what they should be, it’s a clear sign of a hacked site.
A hacker might have changed your site in a way that’s not visible to the search engines. This can make a big difference in the search results. There’s no need to worry, however. Use our free online tool to check if the site has been hacked or if Google has blocked your site for any reason.
Securing and Fixing Your Hacked WordPress Site
Securing and fixing your hacked WordPress site can be extremely painful and difficult. That’s why we recommend that you let experts handle it.
We use Sucuri to protect all our websites. Check out this blog post to learn how it helped us block 450,000 WordPress attacks in 3 months. It comes with 24/7 website monitoring and a powerful web application firewall, which blocks attacks before they even reach your website.
Cleaning up your website is a great first step in recovering from a site hack. To get more tips about cleaning up your site, check out our beginner’s guide to fixing a hacked WordPress site.
It’s really easy for hackers to gain access to your website once your site is cleaned up. So, you need to keep it as clean as possible in order to prevent a successful hack attempt.
Adding layers of security around your WordPress website involves adding layers of protection around your site. It’s common, for example, to use strong passwords with two-step verification to make sure no one can log in to your site unless they have the right password and the correct username and phone number.
In this guide, you’ll discover how to protect important WordPress files and folders from hackers and learn about WordPress file permissions and security settings to help keep your site safe.
In order to protect your WordPress site, you should make sure that you have an SSL Certificate installed on your web server. Also, you can compare the best business phone services for small businesses.
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Google Analytics is a free web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. The service uses web server logs, browser extensions, and APIs to gather visitors and site usage data.
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Usually, that kind of visit will result in a 100% bounce rate which means that only one page was accessed.
Security is an ongoing process, and 100% security is a myth.