WordPress Malware Removal

Your pages get injected with hidden links or whole spam articles for pharmaceuticals, counterfeits or gambling, usually visible to Google but hidden from you. This is the infection that quietly destroys your search rankings while you notice nothing on the surface.

Visitors, or only visitors arriving from Google, or only those on mobile, get bounced to a scam or malware site. Conditional redirects like these are deliberately hard to reproduce, which is why owners often insist the site “looks fine to me” while customers report otherwise.

The attacker plants a hidden script that gives them command over the site whenever they want, independent of your passwords. This is the piece a quick clean-up misses and the reason so many sites reinfect. Finding and removing every backdoor is the difference between a fix and a temporary reprieve.

On sites that take payments, injected skimmer code can steal customer card details as they type. Others get a crypto-miner that runs in visitors’ browsers, or hidden phishing pages hosted on your domain to attack someone else’s customers. Each of these carries its own reporting and reputational weight, which we flag as we find it.

Blocklisting by Google

Once Google Safe Browsing flags your site, browsers show a full-page red warning and your traffic collapses. Cleaning the site is only half the job; getting the flag lifted is the other half, and we handle the review request as part of recovery.

This is the leading cause in the sites we recover. A plugin with a known vulnerability, left unpatched for months, is scanned for and exploited automatically at internet scale. The fix is not just removing the malware but updating or replacing the vulnerable component that invited it.

Reused or guessable admin passwords fall to automated login attempts, and an exposed XML-RPC endpoint lets attackers try thousands of combinations quickly or amplify the attack. We check whether brute force against wp-admin or XML-RPC was the route in and shut it down.

A “free” premium plugin from an unofficial source frequently ships with a backdoor baked in. It works, so nobody suspects it, while it quietly hands access to whoever planted it. If we find one, it goes, and we explain why the saving was never real.

Vulnerable file upload and hosting

An insecure upload form or a vulnerable neighbouring site on shared hosting can be the true origin. We check for both, because cleaning your site is pointless if the infection walks back in from the account next door.

We use server access logs and file-modification timestamps to pinpoint when the site was first touched and which request did it. A cluster of files all changed at the same odd hour, traced back to a single suspicious POST in the logs, usually tells the whole story of the entry point and the injection.

We confirm the infection, capture the current state, and take a backup of the compromised site before touching anything, so we preserve the evidence of how it happened. We also check whether the site is actively harming visitors, which raises the urgency.

We stop the ongoing damage: taking the site to a holding page if it is attacking visitors, resetting credentials, and cutting the attacker’s active access. This buys a clean workspace without destroying the forensic trail.

We remove the malware from every file and database table, and we hunt down the backdoors and web shells that a symptom-only clean leaves behind. Rogue admin accounts, hidden scheduled tasks and injected must-use plugins all get cleared. This phase is where reinfection is actually prevented.

We restore clean core, plugin and theme files from known-good versions, repair the database, and confirm the site works and is genuinely clean. Then we submit the review requests to lift any Google Safe Browsing or vendor blocklist warnings, so your traffic can come back.

We close the gap for good: updating everything, removing what you do not use, enforcing strong passwords and two-factor authentication on admin accounts, correcting file permissions, locking down or protecting XML-RPC, and putting a web application firewall in front of the site to block the next automated attack.

Customer accounts, WooCommerce orders, contact-form submissions and newsletter lists are all personal data. If a skimmer harvested checkout details, or a backdoor gave access to your user table, the compromise likely exposed personal data and you need to assess it, not just clean it. We work out what the attacker could reach and over what period.

Where exposure is likely to risk people’s rights, GDPR Article 33 requires you to notify the supervisory authority within 72 hours of becoming aware, and Article 34 may require telling the affected individuals directly if the risk is high. We give you the technical facts on what was accessible so your data protection officer can make that call with confidence.