In dealing with hacked websites, a company that we used to have come up a lot in conversations with clients was SiteLock. There have been many problems we have run across with them in past years. We were contacted this week by someone dealing with them after malware was detected on their website by Bluehost. Bluehost gets paid by SiteLock if you hire SiteLock to clean up the website, which is why they promote hiring them to clean it up. It isn’t because SiteLock does a good job of it.
That was on display with what this person was dealing with this week. They were now on the fifth day of SiteLock working on removing the malware from their hacked WordPress website (or at least they were supposed to be working on it). It shouldn’t take that long. It usually should take a few hours to do that clean up. At least when we are cleaning up a hacked WordPress website, that is how long it takes. That is with us doing a proper cleanup, whereas lots of providers, including SiteLock in our past experience, don’t do, so it should take less time than that.
We don’t have good advice to give to those who have already hired SiteLock. But for those that haven’t, the best advice is to avoid them.
If someone else has good advice for those who have hired them and are experiencing problems, leave a comment below.
A Better Alternative to SiteLock For Cleaning Up a Hacked Website
If your web host is pushing you to hire SiteLock to clean up a hacked website, we provide a better alternative, where we actually properly clean up the website.