It is a known fact that more than 40% of the web is powered by WordPress.Despite its advantages of facilitating people with entertainment and educating readers, it is unfortunate that WordPress is often compromised.
It is open source with a gamut of information, which is why WordPress website developers around the world are constantly contributing towards its improvement.
WordPress site owners need to be constantly aware and vigilant of cybercriminals who seek to take advantage of safety gaps. And one of the biggest threats is malware.
By learning how to remove malware from WordPress you can take quick action to secure your site from future invasions. Here’s a detailed post on how to avoid the risks of malware with WordPress malware removal plugins.
For a novice who may not be aware of how to scan for malware, these plugins can come in handy.
It doesn’t matter if your website is safe and hasn’t been affected by malware; it is crucial to take measures to keep your site safe.
What is WordPress malware?
Let’s get to the basics of the term malware, which means malicious or malicious codes that can compromise your website by entering its security gaps and causing harm.
When it comes to malware in WordPress or WordPress websites, it can greatly damage your website by reducing its performance immensely. Everything from speed, website server, content, and experience is negatively affected
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How can WordPress malware affect your site?
By now, you would have understood what WordPress malware means and how this can create havoc in a user’s life.
Here’s where you get a complete understanding of the extent of damage WordPress malware can cause:
- Devouring Server Space Rapidly
By the time you find out that hackers have already gotten into your WordPress website and have taken control, they have access to not one but many things.
They can exploit the user’s rights by tampering with data and taking control of the server
And so much more.
- Hackers can use your website as a shield to attack other websites
- Spam email infestation
- Consumer server space
- Lower website performance
2. Deterioration Of User Performance
Hackers often aim big. If you have great traffic coming to your site, they can post explicit content on your website, which can cause a severe decline and bounce back.
They stop lead generation, and that would affect the user if they were running a successful business online.
3. Decline in Website Speed
Google and other search engines keep a check on how fast the website loads, as it affects the rank. If the user experience is low and shows slow loading, it can result in a loss of traffic, which in turn will harm the business.
4. JavaScript Infestation Into Your Website
You may have noticed that sometimes irrelevant pop-ups may appear while browsing the website. These pop-ups will ask you to click and redirect you to an unknown site which again has nothing to do with the website that you have opened.
This means that the website has been hacked or infested by malicious external Javascript.
When you try to open the webpage, the malicious JavaScript gets activated as well. This malware hampers the traffic that comes to your website and makes the user experience slow.
Best WordPress Malware Removal Plugins to Protect Your Website
Each Malware Removal Plugin may differ a bit from each other in functionality
Some may offer extra-added programs, while others may offer different protection methods. But most of them have the same purpose: to protect a WordPress website from malware intrusions.
These WordPress malware removal services vary from being free to having premium prices as well.
Here’s a list of the best WordPress malware removal plugins:
- Quttera Web Malware Scanner:
Quttera Quttera Web Malware Scanner is an efficient WordPress security plugin that protects your website. The reason why it is a great WordPress security plugin is that it can scan for JavaScript code complications,auto-generated malicious content, malicious iframes, and multiple other things. Not just that, it helps in checking if your site is blacklisted by Google.
How does it work?
Quttera has the advantage of having one of the largest suspicious code patterns, which makes it efficient to check all the wp-content files. Quttera uses PHP regex matching to scan all the files. The suspicious code samples are base64 encoded and can be tracked in the patterns.db’ file in the plugin. This plugin runs the site domain names through an external malware scanner.
Key security features of Quttera:
- Locates the files that are tampered with by PHP Malware
- Exposure-induced PHP shells
- Keeps a check on blacklist status
- Artificial Intelligence scanner
- Finds external embedded link
2. Malcare Security: malwareThis is one of the most popular Malware scanners. With a mind-blowing accuracy of 99%, this malware removal plugin can instantly scan your website with just one click.
The best part is the Malware security team will instantly step in if the automatic scanner feature of this plug-in does not work for some reason.
Another advantage of Malcare is that they use their server to scan and remove malware, making it extremely user-friendly user user-friendly and not affecting your website’s performance while the scan takes place.
Key security features of Malcare:
- Website cleaning in less than a minute
- Goes through hacked files in detail
- Secures Websites
3. Sucuri Security
Sucuri is one of the most efficient plugins that are available. Apart from the free version available in the WordPress directory, their paid services start at $16.66 per month.
Key security features of Sucuri security:
- Website hardening
- The perfect choice for monitoring any activity that can be damaging
- Audit security activity
- Takes mandatory security measures after the hack is spotted
- Integrity monitoring of files
How does Sucuri Security work?
It has a two-step working procedure.
The first step is to create a hash for the plugin and theme files. Then it eventually runs them through its database and compares them with current entries. If it finds any plugin that does not fit in with the one in the database, then it is marked as malicious.
The 2nd-step is when the domain runsSiteCheck through the Sucuri Site Scanner Sitecheck. It retrieves all the URLs in the front-end files of the site, extracts the contents, and checks them against the malicious database.
4. WordFence Security:
This Malware removal plugin is one of the most extensive and powerful security plugins available today. Wordfence Security has one of the largest databases of malware samples to compare with and is quite frequently updated. The premium version of WordFence includes features such as real-time IP blacklists, firewall rules, and many more.
How does WordFence work?
WordFence scans the core of WordPress files against the hash code of each file that is stored in the WordFence Malware Signature database. Other than the core files, it also checks the plugins and themes against the malware signatures in its database.
WordFence Security Key features
- Blocks complex malware attacks through a Firewall
- WordFence is constantly updated with Threat Defense Feeds.
- Foresees hack attempts
- Recovery tools for security
5. Anti-Malware Security and Brute-Force Firewall
These high-performing plug-ins are the most commonly used security plug-ins and will do a complete scan within no time to find and block malicious threats. The plug-in is known to destroy backdoor scripts like SoakSoak
The efficient plugin will update vulnerable versions of timthumb scripts to guard your site against new attacks. The paid version of the plugin will limit DDoS and brute-force attacks on WordPress logins and monitor the core files.
Anti-malware security and Brute-Force Firewall key features
- Automatic Updates Definitions
- Consolidated Power Firewall
- Wp-login to protect from attacks
- Protects the integrity of core WordPress files
6.iThemes Security-
This efficient plugin helps to protect your website from unwanted attacks. It offers cool features such as two-factor authentication, brute force protection, database security, file change detection, and strong password imposition.
Ithemes security is an extremely useful tool for ensuring the safety and security of WordPress sites.
iTheme Security key features
- Two-factor authentication
- File change detection
- BruteForceProtection
- WordPress Salts and Security Keys
- Strong Password Imposition
WordPress Malware Removal Services: A malware removal service is required when the user is not able to access the website and does not have adequate knowledge of how to do it manually.
Once the malware is successfully removed, it is crucial to always take the required steps to prevent it from getting attacked.
It is mandatory to ensure that your website does not face any serious threats or malware attacks in the future. With WordPress malware removal plugins, it can become handy for you to understand the safety of your website.