How do I clean a hacked or malware-infected WordPress site?

WordPress is one of the world’s most popular website-building tools. Because of this fame, it has also become a target for hackers or cyberattacks. Common signs of a hacked site include completely disfigured web pages or links to other sites, malicious or otherwise. If you see these signs, your WordPress site is probably infected with malware. Once you’ve confirmed that your site is hacked, take the necessary steps. But how do you actually clean up a hacked or malware-infected WordPress site? Then find out the steps you need to take to remove this malware.

Preparing to clean a hacked or malware-infected WordPress site

How do you clean up a hacked or malware infected WordPress site? First of all, don’t panic, but act fast to prevent the spread ofviruses. To start with, limit visits to your infected site to move faster and be more effective. To do this, edit the file either via an FTP client or via a file manager. For the latter, you need to go to the dashboard of your hosting control.

Don’t hesitate to call on a WordPress expert like on BeFreelancr to guide you through the process

Create a backup of your hacked or infected WordPress site

This back-up creation is important, because it allows you to identify any malware in your WordPress site. You can quickly find the virus just by comparing your initial WordPress files and those after the hacking.

Restore WordPress site using available backups

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If you can’t restore your WordPress site with the previous step, use the old version of your site. This method is practical and advantageous, as it allows you to back up all your data before the hack.

If not, contact your web host. He may have a backup of files belonging to your WordPress site. If you’ve chosen a good host, they can perform regular backups of your data.

Update your WordPress site’s access keys and keywords

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Many pirates use brutal force attacks to gain access to various WordPress sites. They thus use malware and crack logins and passwords. To increase the security of your WordPress site, change your password regularly. Note that to minimize cases of hacking, opt for strong passwords and don’t reuse them on other accounts. If possible, use online password generators such as Random Password Generator or Secure Password Generator.

Update WordPress

The update of WordPress is also one of the steps in ” how to clean up a hacked or malware-infected ? “. This update is essential, because the older and more obsolete the version of WordPress you’re using, the more vulnerabilities you’ll eliminate from your WordPress site. You should then update certain elements such as themes and plugins, the WordPress version itself and the PHP version.

Reset file permissions

To protect your sites from piracy, make sure it’s only you who’s the admin. If not, reset the file permissions via your dashboard.

Removing malware from a WordPress site with antivirus

To optimize the security of your site and even your machine, scan it with a quality antivirus like Bitdefender, McAffe, ESET or others. Once you’ve found any viruses, don’t hesitate to delete them. Then clean up your site’s database and optimize it with an extension like Wp-Sweep.

Then don’t forget to remove and reinstall your WordPress installation to eliminate any security vulnerabilities.

Removing SEO damage from malware on a WordPress site

To finish cleaning up your hacked WordPress site. It’s important to know that hackers attack a site either to do SEO hacking, or to inject spam into the site. And if you fall victim to this, you’ll never get a good referencing on Google. To remedy this, add your site to ” search controle ” then validate to confirm that the domain name really belongs to you.