WordPress Hacked: The Recovery Reality Check

I have seen the aftermath of WordPress hacks more times than I would like. The panicked emails. The frantic googling. The sinking realization that the backup from last week might already be infected. Getting hacked is bad enough. What happens next often makes it worse.

You Probably Will Not Notice Right Away

Here is what surprised me when I started paying attention to breach data: most site owners have no idea they have been hacked. Nearly 18% of infected sites stay compromised for over a week before anyone notices. Some go months.

The signs are subtle at first. Your site feels a little slower. Some visitors mention weird redirects, but you cannot reproduce them. There are strange files in your uploads folder that you do not remember creating. By the time something obvious happens, like Google slapping a warning on your site or your host suspending your account, the infection has usually spread everywhere.

In my experience, the sites that catch infections early are the ones that were actually looking. Activity logs, file monitoring, regular check ins. Everyone else finds out the hard way.

The Real Cost Is Not the Cleanup

Professional malware removal runs a few hundred dollars for simple infections. Complex breaches can cost several thousand. But that is not where the real damage happens.

The Ponemon Institute puts the average small business data breach at over $2 million when you factor in everything. Downtime, lost sales, reputation damage, legal exposure. 60% of small companies that get hit go out of business within six months. That sounds dramatic until you watch it happen.

What gets people is the cascade effect. When browsers display that "This site may be hacked" warning, traffic drops by up to 95%. eCommerce sites see abandoned carts and chargebacks. Google stops trusting your site and rankings tank. Customers leave and do not come back.

Recovery from that kind of damage takes months, not days. And that assumes you actually clean the infection properly the first time.

What Most People Get Wrong

The biggest mistake I see is incomplete cleanup. Someone removes the obvious malware, changes their admin password, and calls it fixed. Then they get reinfected three days later.

Here is why: malware almost always installs backdoors. Hidden files, rogue admin accounts, modified core files that look normal. If you miss even one, the attackers just walk back in. Over 60% of reinfected sites failed to change all their passwords or overlooked hidden admin accounts the attackers created.

Another common mistake is restoring from backup without knowing when the infection started. If your site was compromised two weeks ago and your oldest backup is from last week, you are just reinstalling the same malware.

The worst mistake is fixing the symptoms without fixing the cause. The attackers got in through something. An outdated plugin, a weak password, a vulnerable theme. If you do not figure out what that something was and fix it, you are just waiting for the next attack.

Cross Site Contamination Is Real

If you run multiple WordPress sites on the same server, this matters. Infection spreads between sites. I have seen people clean one site three times before realizing the infection was coming from a forgotten staging site on the same hosting account.

The DollyWay campaign earlier this year hit over 10,000 sites and showed just how sophisticated this has gotten. It disabled security plugins, re-obfuscated its code constantly, and injected fresh malware into clean plugins every time a page loaded. Partial cleanup was useless against it.

The GDPR Problem

If you handle EU user data, you have 72 hours after discovering a breach to notify authorities. That deadline is nearly impossible to meet when you are still in panic mode trying to figure out what happened.

Sites without incident response plans spend those first 72 hours scrambling instead of systematically responding. Penalties for failing to notify can hit 2% of global turnover or 10 million euros. Most small site owners have no idea this obligation exists until it is too late.

The Time and Money Reality

Simple infections take 2 to 4 hours to clean properly. Complex breaches take 24 to 48 hours. If your time is worth $50 an hour, 12 hours of DIY cleanup costs $600 before you even factor in the risk of missing something and having to do it again.

SEO recovery is the slow part. Google needs time to trust your site again. Traffic can recover within 24 hours if you move fast and do everything right. More often it takes weeks or months, depending on how long the infection was active and what the attackers used your site for.

The Uncomfortable Truth

90,000 attacks hit WordPress sites every minute. 90% of vulnerabilities are in plugins. Only 27% of WordPress professionals have any kind of breach recovery plan, even though 96% have faced at least one security incident.

Getting hacked once is bad. Getting hacked twice is worse. The sites that recover successfully treat the breach as a learning opportunity. They figure out what went wrong, fix the underlying vulnerability, and implement monitoring so they catch problems early next time.

The sites that fail are the ones that panic, do incomplete cleanup, and go right back to the same practices that got them compromised. That is why we built our plugin to handle the prevention side quietly in the background. Recovery is hard. Not needing to recover is easier.