Is my website safe from being hacked?

Website hacking is one of the biggest concerns for businesses – and rightly so! 

Once in, attackers can cause catastrophic destruction for businesses by stealing data, altering content, disrupting services, or using your website for illegal activity. 

It can damage brand reputation and brand trust, and impact consumer spending. There may also be legal and regulatory risks to your business, particularly if a data breach has occurred. 

Hacking can happen to any business, regardless of its size, even those with robust security systems in place. Take high street giant M&S. They fell victim to a significant cyberattack in April 2025, which forced a suspension of online ordering and click-and-collect services, leaving shoppers unable to buy online for months. As a result, M&S’s profits were almost wiped out, with profits dropping by 99% compared to the previous year. 

So, if you think your website is fine or that this is a problem that couldn’t happen to your business, consider what the impact could be on your business. 

Is hacking an issue you can afford to ignore? 

Why are websites hacked? 

There are a number of reasons why attackers target websites. It could be financially motivated for criminal purposes,  by hactivists making political statements or opportunistic hackers using bots to identify weaknesses in your website. 

Typical examples of hacking that we have seen include: 

• Redirecting visitors from your website to elsewhere to purchase
• Sending visitors to a 3rd-party site to pay for the goods they are purchasing, and marking the order as complete, so you send out the parcel without being paid.
• Display site takeover messages telling you that you’ve been hacked to show you they have access and to cause panic
• Deleting websites from servers
• Changing all usernames and passwords so that you can no longer access your website 

This can happen to websites built on any platform; however, if you have a WordPress website, then it’s possible your website could be hacked. 

WordPress powers approximately 43% of the world’s websites, and as an open-source platform – with its code publicly available – it is a prime target for hackers and malware. 

So, if you have a WordPress website, it’s essential that you take precautions to protect your website as much as possible and protect your business from hackers. 

How to protect your website from hackers

Don’t make assumptions about website protections and think other people are looking after it. You need to know for certain that your web maintenance and hosting team is doing everything possible to protect your website. 

Here are some questions to kick-start the conversation… 

• Does your hosting provider protect their servers with a Firewall?
• Is your WordPress website regularly updated?
• Is your WordPress site using the latest version of plugins?
• Is your site protected from DDoS and BOT attacks?
• Are you using Two Factor Authentication for logins?

If the answer to any of those questions is no, then you need to take action immediately. 

Get your web team to put an action plan in place to confirm that protective software or hardware firewall has been installed and that you’re protected from potential attacks. Ask them to put a maintenance plan in place to continually check your website’s safety, and ask them to add an extra level of login security to your website. 

Signing up for a service like Cloudflare can provide you with the firewall, DDoS, and bot protections that you need. Installing a software firewall on your site provides an added layer of security and offers the two-factor authentication you need as well.

Most importantly, keep your WordPress site and its plugins up-to-date to ensure that the latest security updates have been applied.

Need help protecting your website from hackers? 

Think EQ specialises in helping businesses protect their websites from hackers, so if you need help, get in touch. 

We can review your website and provide a report on potential vulnerabilities and how to avoid issues.