WordPress is one of the most used content management systems (CMS) on the market today, it is easy to generate content and get it online in a hurry. Today over 450.000.000 websites are created with WordPress CMS and that is about 20% of the internet today. Source https://www.whoishostingthis.com/
Hackers tend to target WordPress Websites more often than before, The CMS is not very secure in its standard installation and can be attacked thru the Admin profile or thru an old plugin that has not been updated in a long time. Auto-update is coming in the newest WordPress installation that will be released (after this is written). WordPress 5.5 has some new auto-update features. It can be fatal to auto-update plugins without the knowledge if the plugin will work with your theme.
When your website is hacked, the hacker can use your website to direct all traffic to their website and that can harm your Google ranking. If the hacker will is only to harm your ranking, they can make your website work against Google guidelines and then Google will penalise your website.
To protect your WordPress installation from a hacker, you can use different Plugins to help you out. We have monitored hundreds of WordPress installations and we can see how often a hacker is trying to hack its way into the WordPress installation. We recommend our clients to do the following to protect them from hackers.
If a WordPress website gets hacked then in most cases the website will be changed to serve the benefit of the hacker and in that case the website content might be changed so that Google sees a nother website.
We have seen cases where the whole website has been redesigned and all the web traffic has been redirected to a new website, most of the pages on the website was deleted and when website visitors tried to visit product sites the pages were not there (404) and the client lost a lot of revenue.
If you need any help with your WordPress Security please contact us.