8 Warning Signs That Your WordPress Website Has Been Hacked

Although WordPress continues to dominate the website designing and development realm, it is still not absolutely safe from the hackers. One way or another, the hackers find a technique to bypass your website security and wreak havoc on it. If you have a leading and successful site, there is always a risk of getting hacked. It may be your competitors or some people who do hacking for fun.

Denial of service, local file inclusion, phishing, defacement, cross-site scripting and shell upload are some site attacks, and there are several threats and attacks are continually being developed. So, you must protect your site from the hacking attacks and always keep the updates whether your website is hacked.

Signs Indicate For Your WordPress Site Is Hacked

• Slow & Unresponsive Website

  This one is the primary signs that indicate your site might be hacked. When your website takes more than usual time to open, or it has become unresponsive, it means your website is hacked. It could be a special kind of attack like denial of service. Multiple servers and infected bots are involved in this attack which sends several requests to the server via fake IP addresses. On getting the excess requests, your server gets overload. As a result, the server refuses to respond to the traffic, and it crashes down. Another reason could be codes entered by the hackers that slowed down your site.

• Defaced Homepage

  A sudden change in the website design layout is an indication of a hacked site. It could be minor or significant change such as the disappearance of one or two images due to misplaced code or technical error. And, the significant difference is when many images are disappeared. When you notice the weird pictures on your site, it could have been hacked. The defaced homepage is another sign in which your homepage is replaced with other random pages that could be posted by the hacker.

• Unable To Access The Admin Page

  In case, you are unable to access your website’s admin page, it means hackers have reached to your admin page and changed your login details. The moment you notice this, immediately analyze and start taking security measures.

• Unnecessary Files Or Scripts On The Server

  Do you find the presence of suspicious-looking JavaScript or other scripting files on the server? If yes, it is a sign of the existence of some malware on your site. Although you are well versed with the entire directories inside the webserver, it could be difficult to look around every file to find the malicious script.

• Website Traffic Drops

  Check your Google Analytics report, if your website traffic gets an unexpected drop, it means your site is hacked. It may happen that some hackers hacked into your website and redirected traffic.

• Unnecessary Pop-Up Or Ads Display

  Your site may have some pop-ups or ads on your site that redirect you to another website on clicking them. These kinds of attacks are utilized to divert your site traffic to other illegal or spammy websites by displaying the attractive pop-ups. Moreover, you may even get a warning sign in your browser that your site has been hacked.

• Suspicious User Accounts

  When your site has open registration, and you don’t have any spam protection installed on your site and then, you find millions of spam account along with, this is not something you should worry about. Just delete those accounts from your website and go ahead. In case, you don’t have open registration and then, you find doubtful accounts on your site, you should consider this. You can inspect those accounts and determine whether these are allowed privileges. If you find the spam accounts having administrative privileges, then your site hacking is confirmed.

• Unusual Activity In Your Server Logs

  Server logs are common text files that keep the log of multiple activities that happen on your web server. These files contain the record of all errors that take place on your web server and all your internet traffic. So, if you notice unusual activity on your logs like traffic from a specific website or your site is making connections to few random IP addresses, it indicates that your site is hacked.

How To Prevent WordPress Website Hacks

• Keep on monitoring your website’s traffic through your hosting provider or Google Analytics.
• Take immediate action when you notice anything unusual in your site such as design defacing, spammy links or code, site traffic low or higher, etc.
• Always prefer to use the updated version of WordPress, themes and plugins.
• Buy the plugins and themes from reputable developers to prevent poorly coded software and vulnerabilities.

With the rise of hacking acts, it is necessary for the website owner to consider secure WordPress hosting. So, you should design a secure website as well as monitor it to prevent the risk of getting hacked. At WebLift, with the strategical design approach and innovative tools, we design secure websites and provide overall site maintenance in Ottawa. Our team of professionals is committed to delivering satisfying results to our clients.