How to Check If Your Website Has Been Hacked

Most hacked websites do not announce themselves with an obvious defaced homepage. The more common reality is much quieter: the site looks completely normal to the owner, while in the background it is sending spam emails, hosting hidden pages, or redirecting a portion of visitors elsewhere. By the time a business owner notices, Google may have already flagged the site, hosting providers may have suspended the account, or customers may have started reporting strange behaviour.

Here is how to check whether your website has been compromised, even if everything looks fine on the surface.

Check Google Safe Browsing and Search Console

Google maintains a free tool that checks whether a website has been flagged for malware or phishing. Searching for your domain through Google's Safe Browsing site status tool will immediately show whether Google has detected anything harmful associated with your site.

If you have Google Search Console set up for your website, check the Security Issues section. This is one of the most reliable early warning systems, since Google often detects compromised sites before the owner notices anything wrong, and will display specific details about what was found and when.

Search for Your Site with Unexpected Terms

A common hacking pattern involves injecting hidden pages or content related to topics completely unrelated to your business, often pharmaceutical products, gambling, or counterfeit goods, designed to rank in search results and redirect traffic elsewhere. These pages are often hidden from normal navigation but indexed by Google.

Search Google using "site:yourdomain.com" followed by terms unrelated to your business, such as common spam topics. If unexpected pages on your domain appear in these results, particularly pages with titles or content you never created, this is a strong indicator of compromise.

Check for Unfamiliar Admin Users and Files

For WordPress sites, log into the admin dashboard and check the list of users for any accounts with administrator access that you do not recognise. A common attack technique involves creating a hidden admin account that gives ongoing access even after the original vulnerability is patched.

Similarly, check recently modified files on the server, particularly in theme and plugin folders, for files with unusual names or recent modification dates that do not correspond to any legitimate update you made. Files with names designed to look like normal WordPress files but with subtle misspellings are a common sign of injected malicious code.

Test for Unexpected Redirects

Some hacks only redirect visitors under specific conditions, for example only for visitors coming from Google search results, or only on mobile devices, specifically to avoid detection by the site owner who typically visits the site directly by typing the URL.

To test this, search for your website on Google and click through from the search results rather than typing the URL directly, and test on both desktop and mobile. If you are redirected to a different website unexpectedly, particularly only when arriving via search, this is a strong sign of a conditional redirect hack.

Watch for Unexplained Performance or Resource Changes

A compromised website is often used to run additional processes in the background, whether sending spam emails, mining cryptocurrency, or serving content to other visitors. This can cause a noticeable slowdown in your website's performance, unexpected spikes in server resource usage, or your hosting provider reaching out about unusual activity on your account.

If your hosting provider has contacted you about unusual outbound email volume, excessive resource usage, or has temporarily suspended your account citing a security concern, take this seriously even if the website itself appears to be working normally for you.

What to Do If You Find Evidence of a Hack

If you find evidence of compromise, the priority order is to change all passwords associated with the website (hosting account, admin accounts, database, and FTP) using a different device than the one you normally use, take a backup of the current state for investigation purposes even though it is compromised, and then begin the cleanup process, which typically involves removing malicious files, closing the vulnerability that allowed access, and restoring from a clean backup if one exists from before the compromise.

If you do not have the technical experience to do this safely, this is a situation where bringing in a developer immediately is worth the cost. A compromised website that remains live continues to cause damage, whether to your search rankings, your domain's email reputation, or your visitors, for every additional day it is not addressed.

How to Reduce the Risk Going Forward

Most website compromises exploit known vulnerabilities in outdated software. The single most effective prevention is keeping WordPress core, themes, and plugins updated consistently, using strong unique passwords for all admin accounts, limiting the number of admin users to only those who genuinely need access, and maintaining regular backups stored separately from the website itself so a clean restore point always exists.