A hacked website can feel like a nightmare — the kind that hits you out of nowhere and leaves your stomach in knots. One moment your site is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: bringing in customers, sharing your story, supporting your business. The next moment, everything feels wrong. Strange pop‑ups appear. Your homepage looks different. Your hosting company sends an alert. Or worse, Google flags your site as unsafe.
It’s more than an inconvenience. It’s a violation. And for many business owners, it feels personal.
But here’s the part that often gets lost in the panic: a hacked website is fixable. You can recover. You can regain control. And you can come out of this with a stronger, more secure site than before. The key is knowing what to do in the first hour — because those early steps determine how much damage is contained, how quickly you can restore your site, and how safely you can protect your customers.
This series is designed to guide you through the entire recovery process with clarity and calm. Whether you’re a small business, nonprofit, freelancer, or community organization, you’ll learn exactly what to do, why it matters, and how to prevent this from happening again. Let’s start with the very first move.
Your First Priority: Stop the Damage
When your website is hacked, the attacker may still be inside your system. That means every minute counts. Before you think about cleaning files, restoring backups, or contacting your hosting provider, your immediate goal is simple: Stop the bleeding.
Just like in a medical emergency, you don’t jump straight to surgery — you stabilize the situation first. In the digital world, that means preventing the attacker from continuing to modify your site, steal data, or infect your visitors.
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Prevent Further Changes
If the attacker still has access, they can:
- Add more malware
- Create new admin accounts
- Modify your database
- Inject spam links
- Redirect your traffic
- Use your server to attack other websites
The longer they stay inside, the worse the damage becomes — and the harder the cleanup will be. Your first step is to 𝗰𝘂𝘁 𝗼𝗳𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀. In the next post, we’ll walk through how to safely take your site offline without making the situation worse.
Protect Your Visitors
A hacked website doesn’t just affect you — it affects everyone who visits it. Depending on the type of attack, your visitors may be exposed to:
- Malware downloads
- Phishing pages
- Fake login screens
- Redirects to harmful websites
- Spam content
If customers get infected or scammed through your site, the trust you’ve built can disappear instantly. Taking your site offline temporarily is not a failure — it’s a responsible move that protects your audience and your reputation.
Secure Your Accounts
Attackers often gain access through weak or reused passwords. Once inside, they may create new accounts or change existing ones.
Before you do anything else, you’ll eventually need to:
- Change your hosting password
- Change your CMS admin password (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.)
- Change your FTP/SFTP credentials
- Change your database password
- Enable two‑factor authentication wherever possible
But timing matters. Changing passwords too early can alert the attacker and cause them to escalate their activity. Changing them too late can allow them to regain access after cleanup. We’ll cover the correct order in a later post.
Begin Assessing the Situation
Not all hacks look the same. Some are loud and obvious — your homepage is replaced with a message or your site is full of spam. Others are quiet and hidden, designed to steal data or manipulate search rankings without you noticing.
Early signs may include:
- Sudden slow performance
- Unknown plugins or files
- Suspicious admin accounts
- Hosting alerts
- Google Search Console warnings
- Customer complaints
- Redirects to unrelated websites
Your job right now isn’t to fix anything — it’s simply to observe. The more you understand about what happened, the easier it will be to clean up properly.
What Happens Next
In the next post, we’ll walk step‑by‑step through how to take your site offline safely, including:
- The right way to disable your site without losing data
- What NOT to do (common mistakes that make things worse)
- How to protect your SEO while your site is down
- How to communicate with customers during downtime
This is the moment where you regain control — and set the stage for a clean, safe recovery.
Need Immediate Help?
If your site is currently hacked, Green Monkeys Studio can help you recover quickly and safely. Call us at (206) 551-6177 or click to book a free consultation today. Let’s get you back on track.