WordPress security is one of those things that’s often left until it’s too late. About once a quarter I’m asked to help clean up a site that’s been attacked. The attacks happen because Wordpress is left without updating and a known security hole is taken advantage of. Or, more often, it’s a poorly developed theme or plugin that’s not been kept up to date.
There are tons of different motivations for hacking WordPress, including acquiring the user and commenter’s email addresses, inserting backlinks to cheat search engines, or injecting malware that drives traffic to unseamly sites. The hackers that develop this really do a bang-up job of ruining your site, too. They’ll install scripts that install scripts… so you clean one file and a few minutes later it’s infected again.
Worse, when your site is infected and you’re not aware of it – your site will immediately find itself on blacklists that browsers and search engines use to avoid sending visitors to you.
A couple of sites that I’ve cleaned have been savagely infected, requiring me to take the site offline, overwriting WordPress core files, then going line by line through themes, plugins and the actual content stored in the database to detect the malware. It’s painful.
Getting Hacked on WordPress is Preventable
Outside of maintaining WordPress, your plugins, and themes at the latest versions, there’s also some great platforms out there to keep you safe. Sitelock, a leader in cloud-based, comprehensive website security solutions, has turned its attention to WordPress and developed a full suite of options for small, medium, and enterprise businesses to keep their WordPress sites safe. They offer agency, enterprise and even multisite solutions.
See Sitelock’s WordPress Packages
Sitelock’s WordPress offerings include the following features and services:
- Automated site scanning
- Automatic malware removal
- Automatic threat detection scanning
- Automated WordPress patching
- Database scanning
- Automated database cleaning
Additionally, Sitelock has some great features to enhance your WordPress site, including:
- SSL Support
- Website acceleration
- Bad bot blocking
- Customizable traffic filting
- Database attack blocking
When things go wrong, Sitelock’s expert services can offer emergency hacking repair and blacklist removal. And – unlike the other solutions out there – Sitelock has 24/7/365 support available to all of its customers!
See Sitelock’s WordPress Packages
Disclosure: We’re an affiliate of Sitelock and promoting its services.
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