Ranking in search engine results is a valuable marketing tool for organizations, and losing this ranking can directly affect revenue. Search engines do what is best for their users, and one of those strategies is to remove hacked sites and those hosting malware. Google has its own scanner that detects hacked sites, but many site owners are unaware they’ve been hacked until they realize that they no longer receive search engine traffic to their sites. To help site owners fight threat actors and protect sites, shared hoster Create.com uses Imunify360 to detect, stop, and clean malicious content.

WordPress is a Primary Target for Attackers

Create.com offers two options for secure hosting: managed Wordpress and standard shared hosting. Even with standard shared hosting, Create.com customers commonly use WordPress on their sites. Create.com gives customers an alternative and offers managed WordPress hosting, which means that Create.com administrators manage customer sites. Both methods require the best security to avoid exploits since WordPress is a primary target for attackers.

When Google detects that a site has been hacked or hosts malware, it removes the site from search results, which could be devastating for site reputation and revenue. WordPress is a common target for brute-force attacks and malware distribution, but site owners usually don’t have the background or expertise to detect and stop attacks.

The WordPress core codebase is secure, but plugins add risk and potential vulnerabilities. Site owners can add any plugin to the WordPress core, and these plugins could be coded poorly, unmaintained by the developer, or contain backdoors. Create.com turned to Imunify360 to help proactively detect attacks, stop them from affecting site (e.g., brute-force password attacks on the administrator account, malware uploads, or malicious code injection) security.

After implementing Imunify360, Create.com experienced fewer hacked sites. By lowering the number of successful attacks, Create.com preserved their customers’ site ranking and stopped their sites from being blacklisted in Google. By preserving customer site rank, Create.com helped them maintain their revenue and online reputation.

Hosting with Security in Mind

Using Imunify360 for WordPress customers, Create.com was able to protect their managed and unmanaged sites. Because Imunify360 stopped malware and attacks before they could affect customer sites, WordPress site owners could continue monitoring their search engine ranking without worry of being blacklisted. 

Read more about Create.com and how they used Imunify360 to stop attacks, scan hosted websites, and clean malware from infected sites.