If you look at your analytic reports and see a sudden and constantly dropping trend in your website traffic, then it could be a sign that your WordPress site is hacked.
There are some common tell-tale signs that should help you figure out if your WordPress site is compromised. No need to panic, but better safe, than sorry! In this article, we explain why and how to identify a hacked WordPress site using only your analytics statistics data.
Many malware and trojans out there, that hijack a website’s traffic and redirect visitors to spammy websites cause these problems. Some of them don’t redirect logged in users which allow going unnoticed for a while. This is what is happening: let's presume you have 100 visitors normally for a specific period (day, week, month). On average each visitor opens 3 pages from your website, then this means, that you got for your period 300 page views. Visitors are hijacked from the first click, via clicking an altered link from your website, that goes to another spammy website. Those altered links seem normal, only their URL is changed so they redirect as stealth as possible. When this happens, you lose your page views per visitor. Losing 2 page views per visitor means for our presumed statics, that you lost two-thirds of your traffic.
Another reason for the sudden drop in traffic is Google’s safe browsing tool, which might be showing warnings to users regarding your website. Each week, Google blacklists around 20,000+ websites for malware and around 50,000+ for phishing. That’s why every website owner needs to act serious with their WordPress security. When this happens, visitors chose not to open your website. Losing 3 page views per visitor means for our presumed statics, that you lost ALL of your traffic.
Protect your WordPress: BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE! You will also protect your customers, your reputation and your online business!
What to do when you have sudden drop in website traffic?
You can check your website using the Google’s safe browsing tool to see your safety report. Not sure if you have this issue? Can you afford to pretend that all is ok? Head to our security audit page and let us search after this extremely annoying problem right now!
