Signs your WordPress site has been hacked
- Google shows pages you never created, often in Japanese, or about pharmacy, casino or replica products.
- Visitors are redirected to other websites, sometimes only on mobile or only when they arrive from Google.
- Search Console reports a security issue or manual action, or Chrome shows a warning before your site opens.
- Unknown admin users, files or plugins appear, or your hosting provider has suspended the account.
- Organic traffic drops sharply while impressions for strange keywords go up.
Why SEO cleanup matters as much as malware removal
Removing the malicious code is only half the job. Thousands of spam URLs can stay in Google’s index, the sitemap may still list them, and a security warning can keep visitors away. Recovery means cleaning the site and showing Google that the problem is gone.
What the cleanup covers
- Investigation: confirm the type of infection and how widely it has spread, using the site, server files, the database and Search Console.
- Backup first: a copy of the current site is taken before anything is changed.
- Malware and spam removal: malicious files, injected code, spam pages, unwanted redirects and unknown admin accounts.
- Closing the entry point: outdated or abandoned plugins and themes, weak accounts and file permissions, so the same hole cannot be used again.
- Search clean-up: spam URLs return the right status code, the sitemap is cleaned, and removal or review requests are submitted in Search Console where needed.
- Monitoring: we watch Search Console and the index after the cleanup and report what has changed.
If your site is hacked right now
- Do not delete the site or restore an old backup without checking it first: backups are often infected too.
- Change your hosting, WordPress admin and database passwords yourself, and do not send them to anyone by email, form or chat.
- Note what you have seen: example spam URLs, warnings and the date you first noticed the problem.
- Contact us through the form below so we can review the site.
Honest expectations
Every infection is different, so the work is quoted after we have reviewed the site. Once the site is clean, Google usually needs time to recrawl it and drop spam URLs from the results, and some recovery steps depend on Google’s review. We cannot promise a fixed recovery date or ranking, but we will tell you clearly what we have done and what is still in progress.
Related services: WordPress SEO audit · Search Console and indexing help · PHP upgrade service