My dad has always told me, “If you are going to crash, make sure you are going slow.” This applied to driving a car, tractor, boat, and more. The idea behind this is that there is less damage incurred if you are going slow. Of course, nobody wants to crash, but if you are going to, it is best to do it when you are not going fast. Similarly, a website hack is not ideal, but it does not have to be the end of the world for you or your website! In fact, if you are regularly monitoring your website (or have a service to monitor it, as is included in Your Web Pro’s monthly maintenance services), you can catch a hack early on and know what to do if or when it happens — as my dad would say, you have crashed while going slow. There are several steps you can take if your website is hacked, and each of these steps involve knowing that your site has been hacked before it turns into a monster of a problem.
When your website is hacked, first you need to check for when the problem occurred. If it happened recently, you have more chance of solving the problem without it being a giant ordeal. The longer ago the hack happened, the more likely it is that you are going to have bigger problems to deal with and larger issues arise. Next, you need to look for how your site was hacked. Immediately pull the most recent backup from before the hack and restore it. You need to find out how the hacker got in and what they did so you can clean the site up and prevent a recurrence. Whether you need to update the software you use, find a new password that is stronger, or get a stronger filter on your email account, these changes need to be made quickly. Sometimes identifying the issue is an easy thing that is easy to clean up, and others it means a total loss on the website and a redo. This is why monitoring and backups are so important. When your site is monitored and good backups are stored, you are “crashing going slow.” Without monitoring, a hack can completely destroy a website.
When your website is hacked, call Your Web Pro. We can check into it and see what the issue is, and then we can help you figure out what to do next.