The Cost of Not Paying Attention to Your Website

Not paying attention to your website can become a costly mistake very quickly.

Recently I had a client come to me for help for a site I’d built for them in 2014. The client’s customers were being warned off the site by their browsers when trying to pay for a product. Turns out the site had been hacked, and hacked very, very thoroughly. It was one of the worst cases I’d ever seen, with over 9,500 hacked files on the account.

The site had no backups, offsite or otherwise, except for the ones done by the host, and those didn’t help since the hacker actually got started almost 3 months earlier. There were a number of admin-level users registered that the client didn’t recognize (one was the hacker, whose account was set up last October). The site hadn’t been scanned in a very long time despite the security plugin that offers a one-touch site-wide scan for malware.

The initial cleanup and removal of the extra admin accounts, changing all the passwords on the server and site, locating the point of origin of the malware and removing as many files as I could came to around $250. The client had to have Sucuri finish the cleanup, as going through thousands and thousands of files manually was obviously not feasible – that came to another $199.

Please, pay attention to your website. If it’s an important part of your business, it deserves some care and time. Make sure:

• You have a fresh backup located somewhere away from your hosting account.
• You check your users – is there anyone you don’t recognize?
• Scan your site. You can use a plugin or a remote tester like Sucuri Sitecheck.

Doing these three things on a regular basis will help you immensely if your site were to get hacked.

The other option is to have WP Minder take care of these things for you – if you don’t have the time to do it yourself, no problem. You don’t need to worry about it – that’s what we’re here for. Learn more about our WordPress maintenance plans.