nce upon a time…
There was a very talented food blogger who was passionate about developing delicious recipes and sharing them with the world. She even took the time to take classes to learn to style and properly photograph her creations to make her blog posts more engaging. Her website was a labor of love.
She used the free version of WordPress at first but after four years she decided she was ready take the leap and have Dawn @ RedSpiralHand migrate her free blog to a fully customized, professional website complete with a new logo and branding.
When Cave Woman Café launched, Dana loved her new, amazing food blog/website and she continued to post more articles and photographs and her audience grew and one month she even received over 18,000 page views!
But a few years later she got busy with other things in her life and her beloved food blog languished a little waiting for her to have time to share more recipes. She didn’t want to mothball the site, it was a valuable collection of well over 100 blog posts that she still used as a personal online recipe book. Other people were still enjoying her recipes too as the site continued to draw traffic as it was now ranking well on search engines.
So there was no way for her to realize in 2019, without any real outward sign, her website became infected with malware. She would not have noticed that the malware had disabled her website security plugin so it was unable to continue running scans. (This is sometimes the first “symptom” of a hacked website.)
If it was not for another problem that cropped up with the site and her hosting provider she may have never known about the issue at all.
After spending countless hours on the phone (mostly on hold) trying to remedy the issues with her hosting provider she got back in touch with us to come and rescue her website for her. I recommended moving to a better hosting service and then dug in to unravel the problems she was having. At that time I noticed that her security plugin seemed to be missing and that any attempts to reinstall it were unsuccessful. (Uh-oh.) We proceeded with the migration knowing better support would be available to help us get to the bottom of any issues.
The day after the website migration, Dana received an email from support and forwarded it to me with a note that said,
“Ah-oh. What’s this mean?”
“Sorry for the bad news but your website has been hacked. They picked it up on the first round of security scans right after your site was migrated.”
“Grrrrrr. sigh. So over my head. Just makes me feel overwhelmed.”
“Don’t worry. They offer one free malware cleanup with your new hosting service. It’s not without risks but I trust them to take care of this for us since they do this all of the time.”
I was so glad to be able to give her this good news. Essentially the site migration and malware cleanup were free of additional charges besides a few hours for me to babysit the whole process and interface with the support team.
In the end it only took them a matter of minutes with their tools to successfully dispatch the evil malware and clean the website. And Dana was of course so happy this was all resolved and in a very short time.
“I’m definitely impressed!”
“Like I said, they have great support!”
(And I meant it. I mean, these sorts of situations are very stressful even for experienced, stout-hearted webmasters!)
At that point I was able to get into the website and dig around and also finally reinstall the security plugin and check the scan logs for for the first time. That’s when I found out that the site was initially hacked back in 2019!
Dana was really lucky the site never went down and the infiltration did not permanently damage her website.
And she lived happily, ever after.
Especially knowing that now her new hosting service and I would be sure to keep a close eye on things so this doesn’t happen again.
The moral of the story:
If you already have a WordPress website you’ll want to be sure that you choose a hosting provider that is built just for WordPress. You will want great support, solid security and nightly backups and also some help from a qualified webmaster if (gasp!) the unthinkable happens to your website.
The real hero of this story is GreenGeeks* “Pro” WordPress hosting and their fearless support team. Of course, not only is GreenGeeks an awesome, affordable solution, they are also a green, carbon neutral company.
So if you are not totally in love with your current hosting service you might consider switching.
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*Yes, I’m an affiliate for GreenGeeks but only because I was already crowing about how much I love them (love and hosting are not words I commonly use together) and, truth-be-told, they make me look good.