My Website Got Hacked, What Do I Do Now?
If your website is hacked, it means someone got in without permission and changed something, whether that's injecting spam links, redirecting your visitors, stealing customer data, or defacing the page outright. It's stressful, but it's almost always fixable, and the fix is usually more straightforward than people expect once you know what actually happened and why.
What does it mean if my website is hacked?
It means an outside party found a way into your website's files, database, or admin login and used that access for their own purposes. Sometimes it's obvious, your homepage shows something completely different, or Google flags your site with a warning. Other times it's quiet. Spam pages get added that you never see, malware gets tucked into your files, or your site starts sending emails you didn't write. A hack doesn't always look dramatic. Some of the worst ones are the ones nobody notices for months, because the damage is happening in the background while the site looks fine to you.
How do WordPress sites get hacked?
WordPress sites usually get hacked through outdated software, weak passwords, or a plugin nobody bothered to update. WordPress itself, plus every theme and plugin installed on it, needs regular updates, and each one of those pieces is a potential door in if it's left old and unpatched. Add a weak or reused admin password, hosting with no real security in place, or a plugin from a source that wasn't keeping up its own maintenance, and you've got an opening. Most hacks aren't personal. They're automated bots scanning thousands of sites for the exact same known weaknesses, and yours got picked because it had one of them. This is exactly why ongoing maintenance matters so much for a site built on WordPress. Our website maintenance work exists specifically to close these gaps before they become a 2am emergency.
How do I fix a hacked website?
You fix a hacked website by finding every piece of the malicious code, removing it completely, patching whatever let it in, and then confirming nothing was left behind to let them back in later. That last part is where a lot of DIY cleanups go wrong. Someone deletes the obvious spam page, feels relieved, and doesn't realize there's a backdoor script quietly reinstalling it a week later. A proper cleanup means checking every file, every user account, every plugin, and the database itself, then updating everything and changing every password tied to the site. If your hosting has clean backups from before the hack, that can speed things up a lot. If it doesn't, the cleanup takes longer and costs more, which is one more reason backups are worth having in place before you ever need them.
Is it cheaper to clean a hacked site or rebuild it?
It depends on how deep the damage goes and how old and patched-together the site already was before the hack. A clean, well-documented site with good backups can often just be cleaned and hardened. A site that was already years out of date, running old themes and abandoned plugins, is a different story. In those cases the hack usually isn't the real problem, it's a symptom of a site that was overdue for a rebuild anyway, and cleaning it just buys you a few more months before the next hack. Our refresh work starts from $750 and keeps the bones of a site that's basically sound while fixing the look, speed, and security gaps. A full rebuild starts from $1,500 and makes the most sense when the old site is so outdated that patching it is just delaying the inevitable. If you're weighing those two paths, our website redesign page walks through what goes into that decision, and our website redesign cost guide breaks down real pricing.
Either way, the fix should include real hosting security, current software everywhere, and a maintenance plan going forward, because a one time cleanup with no ongoing care just means you're waiting for the next one. If you need something built from scratch with security handled properly from day one, our small business web design work covers that too.
We'll look at your hacked or hobbled site, tell you plainly whether it needs a cleanup or a rebuild, and what that actually costs, and that checkup is free whether you hire us or not.
