The 4 Simple Steps To Stopping Hackers From Destroying Your WordPress Website
Recently I had to make one of the worst phone calls of my web-services career. I’d received an email from a client telling me that their website was down; they wanted to know if we could check it out and locate the problem. Their website had been built around 12 months before but they had decided to maintain their own website rather than paying for an ongoing support package from a developer. This is not a problem, WordPress websites are easy to maintain as long as the time is taken to do so. The problem was, the time had not been taken and therefore the site had not been maintained correctly.
I opened up their hosting account to take a look around and what I saw made my stomach drop. Their website has been ravaged. Malicious code had corrupted their WordPress website so badly that literally 90% of the files on their website had been deleted. I checked the backup folder for their hosting account and these had been affected by the virus as well. The thought that made me feel ill was this, had the client been taking their own backups of the website?
I knew that for most small businesses the answer would be no… and it was.
Their website was gone. Thousands of dollars of development time down the drain and I was the one who had to break the news.