Strange pages, redirects to other sites, a warning from Google, or your site suddenly down? Act fast: the steps below stop the damage and clean it up.
Signs your site has been hacked
- Visitors are sent to other websites, often on phones.
- Pages, users or plugins you didn’t add.
- A “dangerous site” warning in Google or the browser.
- Your hosting account suspended, or your mailbox locked for spam.
Do this now
- Change every password
cPanel, every WordPress admin user, FTP accounts and email mailboxes. Use new, long passwords you don’t use anywhere else.
- Scan and clean your files
Look through your website’s files in cPanel’s File Manager for anything you didn’t add, especially recently changed .php files, and remove it. If there’s too much, restore a clean backup instead (step 4). Also scan your own computer with antivirus software: stolen passwords often come from an infected computer.
Website Protection: we scan and clean for youOur Website Protection add-on is a paid service for hosting customers. It scans your website’s files and removes malware automatically, and keeps watching from then on. To add it, open your hosting plan in the client area and look under Addons and Extras, or contact us and we’ll help. If you already have it, see what it found under Security › Monarx Security in cPanel.
- Update everything
Update WordPress, every plugin and every theme. Delete plugins and themes you don’t use, and any admin users you don’t recognise.
- Restore a clean backup if needed
If the site is badly damaged, restore a backup from before the hack. We keep restore points for 30 days. Restoring a backup that already contains the hack brings it back.
- Tell us
Open a ticket so we can check the account is clean and lift any restrictions.
To protect your visitors and the other sites on the server, we can block access to an infected website until it’s clean. We’ll tell you what we found.
Stop it happening again
- Keep WordPress, plugins and themes up to date.
- Only install plugins from trusted sources, never “nulled” paid plugins.
- Turn on two-factor authentication for your client area and cPanel.
- Add Website Protection to your hosting so new infections are caught and cleaned automatically.
If you’d rather not clean it yourself, a web developer or a specialist cleanup service can do it for you.