Every year, a lot of WordPress blogs and websites are hacked. So, how do I identify if my WordPress is hacked?
7 Signs That Your WordPress Site Has Been Hacked:
Sudden Decline in Traffic on Your Website
When you look at the reports from Google Analytics and see a drastic decrease in traffic, this may be a result of hacking the WordPress account. Web traffic is one of the leading measurement indicators about how the website is doing.
There is plenty of malware and trojans out there that hijack traffic on your website and redirect it to spam websites. Most of them do not block logged in users thus making them go unnoticed for some time.
One of the other reasons is Google’s safe browsing tool, which show alerts about your website to users. Each week, Google blacklists around 20,000 malware websites and about 50,000 for phishing. That is why every blogger and business owner need to pay careful attention to their security with WordPress.
You cannot login to WordPress
If you could not log in to tend your administration tasks, then the first sign of hacking may be that your login has stopped working. Often when a hacker takes a WordPress site, they will change the admin’s password and username. They will even delete the main admin accounts once they have created a new controlling admin for themselves.
Your site will remain unsafe until you know how a hacker got into your website.
Suspicious User Accounts
Whenever your site has registration and you are not using any spam registration protection, then you will get the usual “bot” account, spam-spreading account that you can simply delete. However, if you do not open user registration, and new user accounts keep popping up, then this might be the work of hacking.
It is much worse when you have a new account as administrator user role. This probably means that your website is hacked, and the hacker will abuse their admin privileges.
Your WordPress Homepage Is Defaced
Not all hackers try to be obvious and show that they have hacked your website. But there is some that will change or add elements to your homepage to announce that it has been hacked. Some might even try to force owner to give them money.
Sudden unauthorized links added to website
Explore your own site as a new user, then take a look at the bottom and sides of each page. If there are unauthorized pop-ups or ads, then this means that the hackers create a backdoor on your WordPress site which allows them access to modify your WordPress files and database.
New ads usually mean that a hacker wants to manipulate your web traffic to advertise their spammy goods. These advertisements usually appear for new users, or those who went through a search engine.
Unusually slow or unresponsive pages
There are numerous techniques that can slow down the WordPress site’s load speed and page responsiveness. The most common attack is DDOS or Distributed Denial of Services. This is a malicious attack in which hackers use a network of controlled sites or servers to access your site again and again until legitimate users have no resources available. This approach can overload a server and has been known to force a site down temporarily.
It is also likely that your WordPress website is just sluggish and not hacked.
Getting inaccurate information when searched
When you search something and the results from your website show incorrect title or meta definition, this is a sign that your WordPress site is being hacked.
Then when you look at your WordPress content, you will see the correct title and description. This means that the hacker has found a loophole in your website to insert malicious code that modifies the site data in a way that only search engines can see.
Conclusion
Hackers have multiple kind of motives to hack a website. Some are only beginners learning how to hack less secure sites. While some hackers have malicious intentions such as spreading malware, using a website to attack other websites or spamming the internet. If your website is a business, then security should be one of your main priorities. Fixing up a hacked WordPress site can be very painful and difficult. That is why it’s crucial that you have a good WordPress hosting company.