10 indicators to see if your WordPress website is hacked or not.
Most of the time hackers do not leave any indicators that you may find that your WordPress site has been hacked. But there are some indicators that will help you to know about that.
- Invalid Login Credentials Error.
- Irrelevant content coming into your site.
- Irrelevant visiter.
- Drop-in traffic on your website.
- A search engine will show the wrong result to your website.
- Not able to send and receive emails.
- You might be seen that your website does not exist.
- Unknow files in your root folder.
- You might see an unknown registered member.
- You may come across to modify your event schedule.
Let me explain to you these indicators in brief.
Invalid Login Credentials Error.
You might log in to your WordPress site daily. Suddenly one fine day you might start getting invalid login credential errors. That menace you have been attacked by some hacker, and they have been changed your login credential.
Try to contact your service or hosting provider, and tell them to change your login credentials. When it will reset you will be able to login to your WordPress site again.
Irrelevant content coming into your site.
In this scenario, you might see that some of or most of your website content has been showing foreign language. Such as your site content is in English and suddenly your site content shows Chinese or Japanese language. In that case, you should come to know that your site has been hacked.
Irrelevant visitor.
After analyzing Google Analytics if you found a sudden increase in users from a particular country location, that will be another sign your website has been hacked.
Drop-in traffic on your website.
Normally your website performs well. But if you notice that your traffic which is coming to your site has been a drop drastically. It will the indicator that your website has been hacked.
A search engine will show the wrong result to your website.
If your users or your development team searching on Google or any other search engine, they may find weird results about your website. It will be a sign of your site has been hacked.
Not able to send and receive emails.
You might be running email newsletters to your subscribers through your mail server. And you found that you are not able to send or receive emails. It will be another indicator that your website has been hacked.
You might be seen that your website does not exist.
On one fine day, you had seen that your website does not exist that menace someone had attacked your website and might delete your website or all of your content.
Unknow files in your root folder.
While working on your WordPress theme, you might access your root folder on your hosting. In case you found the different files been there, which you have not uploaded over there. You should come to know that someone has hacked into your hosting server and put those files over there.
You might see an unknown registered member.
In case you found out that there are unknown users which you had not created. Most of the time there is multiple user admin to your website. This will be one of the reasons that your website has been hacked.
You may come across to modify your event schedule.
You might have some events scheduled for the next month. And you notice that they have been rescheduled without your knowledge or your permission. This might be another reason that your website has been hacked.
These are some of the signs you should look out for. In order to safeguard your WordPress website. If you notice any of these activities on your website, then you should look out for solutions to ensure your site is safe.
In order to ensure your website is not hacked, you should keep in mind these simple remedies.
Make sure that your website is up to date. That is all your plugins, theme, any software you might use on your CMS etc should be updated regularly for the latest version.
Coming to plugins you should make sure these things are taken into consideration.
Whenever your choose any plugin see to it has been used by many users. Not just a few hundred or so. Which menace the plugin is widely accepted by the developers’ community.
See to it that it received the regular updates. What if some user mentions some bug in the plugin, make sure that the developer community of that plugin worked on the issue and realized an update for that bug.
It is very important that you choose the right plugin for your website.
Another important thing in order to secure your website is to enable HTTPS.
Make sure that your WordPress website is HTTPS ready, in order to do that you should have TLS certification. In the older terms, it was called an SSL certificate.
By now you might get a brief insight about how to safeguard your WordPress website. From preventing hackers attack.
For advance, assistance on WordPress security does comment on this post with your issue, so that I will get back to you with the solution.