Skip to main content
Keep your business open during COVID-19Learn More
Call us
Phone numbers and hours
Help Center

Explore our online help resources

We are experiencing high volume today, and as a result, you may experience longer than usual wait times.
BlogHelp

GoDaddy Help

My website was hacked. What should I do?

A hacked website is really frustrating - it's troublesome for your business and visitors, and removing a hack can be time-consuming. Let's go through the fastest and easiest way to fix your website.

Let's check for warnings

If you’ve seen "This site contains malware" or "The site ahead contains harmful programs" in connection with your site, there’s definitely a problem. To check further, go to https://sitecheck.sucuri.net and enter your domain name.

  • If your website’s been hacked, you’ll see a warning here.
  • No warning? It's less likely (but still possible) that your website has been compromised.

Change your passwords

If your site's been hacked, you need to immediately change all your passwords.

Note: To make sure you use the right instructions, find out what type of hosting account you have.

Your hosting type Passwords to reset
Linux Hosting with cPanel Primary FTP, secondary FTP, databases, apps like WordPress or Joomla
Windows Hosting with Plesk Primary FTP, secondary FTP, databases, apps like WordPress or Joomla

Restore from backup

If you have a backup of your website (and database) that you know wasn't corrupted, you should re-upload it to your hosting account.

If you have Website Backup, you can easily do this for your cPanel or Plesk account.

If you don't have a backup tool, after resolving the issue we recommend adding Website Backup to your account.

Remove the hack

It's nearly impossible for anyone to reliably remove malware from a website by hand. To remove the compromise from your files, we recommend using a service like Website Security.

Identify & fix the weakness

To prevent your site from getting hacked again, you should identify how your site was compromised. There are two types of weaknesses: passwords and structural problems.

Passwords

Most hacks happen because the attacker was able to guess your account's password by brute force. By simply changing your password (and using a stronger one this time), you can prevent these attacks from succeeding in the future.

Structural

These types of weaknesses require thorough testing to identify. There's a lot of security software that can perform these types of scans but, again, we recommend Express Malware Removal. It can identify a number of different issues, as well as help you fix them.