The importance of cleaning a website from viruses

There are various ways a site can become infected. A site may become infected due to the user’s negligence, or it is possible that a user’s host may be abused as a victim host due to the installation of invalid plugins and templates, as well as nulled content management systems. A site becoming infected will have a direct impact on the site’s ranking in the results because user security is a red line for search engines.

A site becoming infected has serious consequences for businesses, the most important of which are the site going offline, being removed from search results, not being able to access the admin panel, or being redirected to external sites.

Cleaning a site from viruses is one of the biggest challenges for site administrators these days, because it is one of the most common and complex problems for sites; as a result, if you do not think about cleaning your site from viruses and infections today; irreparable losses may be incurred to your site.

Given the lack of care in installing WordPress templates and plugins by business managers, webmasters, and other people working in this field; The rate of virality of hosting has increased sharply, which causes a sharp decrease in the site’s SEO, loss of customers, transfer to Google’s blacklist, and a sharp decrease in site speed.

Many business managers, due to lack of financial resources, are unable to afford virus and site infection cleaning services, and this is where business managers will think about improving their knowledge in the field of virus cleaning.

If you, as a business manager, are familiar with how to clean a site virus, you can continuously analyze your hosting and site and, if necessary, take action to clean your site virus.

Viral site detection solution

When you are facing specific problems such as not being allowed to log in to the WordPress admin panel, slow WordPress admin panel, redirecting to advertising sites on your site, or seeing a decrease in traffic in Search Console, you should first suspect that your site is hacked or infected with a virus. For a more detailed check, visit your host and check the files inside your host. There should be no files with suspicious names on your host alongside the main WordPress files.

To check your site to see if it has a virus, it is better to visit your host and go to the File manager section and then enter the Public_html folder. In this section, you can see suspicious files alongside WordPress files.

For example, in the image below, you can see that a series of files with the php extension are unusually located alongside other WordPress files, which means that the site has encountered a virus. You can open one of these files and pay attention to the content inside the file. Typically, 99% of these files contain malicious code or backdoors that will cause security challenges for your site.

Example of an infected file in WordPress: Below is an example of a viral file on a host that is encrypted in base64 code. The important point here is that there is a 99% chance that the virus in the form above may be present on your site, and it is better to have it checked professionally by a WordPress expert. Viral files aim to destroy some plugins and especially your site template so that they can create security challenges such as redirects to advertising sites on your site.

Note that if your site has gone viral and you do not pay attention to it; your site visits will definitely experience a sharp drop in the short term and as a result your results in Google search will be displayed as viral and this will cause Google to gradually remove your site from the search results.

To find out if your site addresses are displayed in Chinese or Japanese and if it has been attacked by a url injection attack; you can search your site address in Google as shown in the image below. Example: site:websoltan.com

In this way, all the results related to your site will be displayed and you can ensure the accuracy of your site addresses. As you can see in the image above, the site in question has been attacked by a url injection attack and the search results are displayed in a strange way. When you encounter this problem; Be sure to contact a WordPress expert as soon as possible and get advice.

Another solution that you can use to find out if your WordPress site has been infected with a virus or hack is to check if your site is redirected to external sites or if external spam posts are not displayed on your sites. If the answer is yes, there is a 99.9% chance that your site has become infected with a virus or a so-called malware attack has been activated on your site and this security challenge will cause a sharp drop in site visits and SEO of your site.

Checking the accuracy of cleaning the site virus

To make sure that the site virus cleaning process has been completed correctly, we can check this in two ways:

1- Google Safe Browsing Tool: By adding the address of the desired site in the relevant box, we can see the result of virus cleaning. If Google announces No unsafe content found as in the image below, it means that the desired site does not have a security challenge or virus.

2- Checking the hosting files: By checking the hosting files by a WordPress expert, you can find out whether there are still malicious or viral files on the site.

How does a WordPress site get infected with a virus?

1. Through null or cracked templates or plugins
2. Low host security and uploading infected files to the host
3. Low database security and database corruption or creating an admin account
4. Low site security and site hacking through security bugs in templates and plugins

Site virus cleaning solution

1. Host and database cleaning
2. Manual update of WordPress core
3. Repair database tables
4. Update all templates and plugins
5. Replace original versions of templates and plugins with null or cracked versions
6. Solve the problem of browser warning that the site is viral
7. Remove the website from the search engine blacklist
8. Solve the problem of website phishing
9. Disable redirects to sites
10. Clean irrelevant links from the site content
11. Solve the problem of spam content injection
12. Database optimization
13. Check and remove codes injected into the MySQL database
14. Prevent XSS code injection
15. Complete cleaning of malicious codes
16. Remove shells from the entire site

When is the best time to clean a website from viruses?