WordPress website hacked? How to fix it…!

If your website isn’t displaying the way it should – for example the page header doesn’t display – and your WordPress blog prints out an error instead of displaying your awesome blog posts – and you haven’t changed anything –  it means your website has been hacked.   Chances are it is from your WordPress blog or its third party plugins you are using.  Perhaps from a backdoor, like when in 2011 three popular WordPress plugins (AddThis, WPtouch, and W3 Total Cache), had malicious backdoors added to them via the plugin repository.  That is why it is important to keep your WordPress blog and plugins up-to-date, especially when there are security fixes released.  If you have UltimateWB 3, and WordPress integrated with it, you can still upgrade your WordPress from its admin panel without worrying about the integration being broken – if needed, you just go to your UltimateWB website Admin Panel, Pages > Edit Page > Blog, and click the link to update your blog integration! Easy!

Ok, so how to fix your website that has been hacked, and make sure it doesn’t get hacked again and again – here’s 2 easy steps to do it:
(by the way, you might want to get a backup first, but also make sure you have some anti-virus software installed on your computer! Best to backup in zip/compressed formats, for extra security.)

1) Upgrade all your software files – manually.  You should delete all your current software/WordPress files, and then upload the new ones.  Make sure you don’t delete your uploaded content though, for example uploaded images, files, etc.  For WordPress, these files are under your  wp-content folder.  If you upgrade automatically, you might not be catching the backdoor if it’s an extra file, as it might not get deleted.

2) After step 1, your website/blog should look great, back to normal.  But, you might not be done yet!  You might have missed the backdoor extra file injected on your server.  If you miss the backdoor file, next time it is accessed, your website will be broken again.  You should check your raw access logs.  These are logs keeping track of the traffic to your website, on each access – not just the entry file like in your traffic statistics.  If you don’t know where these are, ask your web hosting company.  You will want to skim through the lines, checking for any weird files being accessed – you will want to delete these files that weren’t part of your website before.

Ok, now you’re done.  Check to make sure your website is running smoothly.  Take a backup of your website/database on a continuous basis.  Sometimes when your website gets hacked, you can lose your data.