Hacked Website Recovery

The standard advice for a hacked website is “clean it”: run a scanner, delete suspicious files, change passwords. Sometimes that works. But if the attacker planted a backdoor in an obscure plugin file or the database itself, the infection returns in a week, and every cleanup round costs you money and reputation. Meanwhile Google flags the domain, browsers show the red warning page, and traffic falls off a cliff.

Our approach is different: we treat the compromised installation as disposable. What actually matters is your content, design and SEO, and those live in the rendered pages, which are almost always intact. We rescue everything visible (plus whatever clean backups or exports exist), verify each asset, and rebuild the site on a fresh stack: new core, original or rebuilt theme, minimal vetted plugins, new credentials everywhere.

The result is not a patched sick site. It is a healthy site that looks identical, ranks the same, and no longer contains the thing that got you hacked.

Why rebuilding beats repeated cleanup

Scanners find known malware signatures. They do not find a legitimate-looking admin user, a modified core function, or a scheduled task that re-downloads the payload. Unless you can diff every file against a known-good original, “cleaned” means “probably cleaned”. A rebuild from verified sources removes the entire question: nothing from the compromised environment survives except content you can read with your own eyes.

It is also usually cheaper than the second or third emergency cleanup, and it comes with a side effect clients like: the rebuilt site is faster and easier to maintain than what they had before the hack.