Is your WordPress site broken? Has it been hacked?
If your WordPress site is down, acting buggy, or worst case scenario…hacked, we can come to your aid and have you on the road to recovery in no time. Rather than panic or stress over the issue, let us diagnose the problem and offer a solution. We’ll probably even leave your site in better shape than it was before the error or infection occurred.
If your WordPress site is down, unresponsive or displaying errors…
This can mean a number of different things, and for a non-developer, trying to troubleshoot this can be a difficult and intimidating process. Sometimes these issues can be related to the hosting server, but most often these sorts of problems are due to a faulty, outdated or incompatible plugin; a bad code snippet, a broken theme, or perhaps all of the above.
This could also mean your site has been compromised by a hacker.
If your WordPress site has been hacked…
Fear not! We are experts at rescuing WordPress sites that have fallen victim to cyber criminals. We can identify the issue, root out the infection, and have you back in business before you know it. Once we’re done, we’ll make sure your site is more secure than it was before the compromise.
Why would someone want to hack into your website?
You may be wondering why your website was hacked and if you were an intended target. Chances are, your website was breached because of a vulnerability in the platform or due to an insecure password, but it’s highly unlikely that the hacker was targeting you specifically. What they were targeting was a vulnerability within your WordPress installation.
WordPress is crazy-popular. As of right now, WordPress powers 25% of all websites, and has a near-60% market share when it comes to content management systems. In much the same way hackers create viruses to exploit Microsoft Windows, WordPress is a prime target due to it’s overwhelming popularity and widespread usage. If you don’t take this threat seriously, and put security measures in place, you will eventually and undoubtedly get hacked.
When a hacker breaks into your site, there are a few things may be up to. For one, they may be wanting to hijack your SMTP service so that they can use your server to send spam emails. Another thing they might try to do is inject malware into your site in an attempt to steal sensitive data either from you or your site visitors. Another purpose may be to hijack your traffic and send your visitors to a spammy pharmaceutical, porn, or online casino website; or maybe they just wanted to hack your site because they could. Regardless of the intent, it’s always bad, and if your site has been compromised, it’s very important that you clean up the mess as soon as possible. Ignoring a hacked website poses security issues to you and your site visitors, not to mention it can dramatically harm your search engine rankings. Google will begin to penalize your site if you wait too long to fix it – even going so far as to remove it from its search index.
As of October 2015, Google identified nearly 490,000 sites which were infected with malware. This staggering figure was made even more alarming by the fact that this number marked an increase of over 160% for the same period the previous year!
As of February 2016, the number of phishing sites online had reached over 293,000, and these are just the sites Google had identified. This number could potentially be even higher due to the number of sites which hadn’t been flagged yet, or had avoided detection.