Clean Experts: WordPress Malware Removal & Site Recovery

Clean Experts: from suspended and flagged to clean, secure and back online.

Clean Experts is a Swiss cleaning company based in Gossau ZH that cleans facades, floors and terraces for clients across Switzerland. Its WordPress website had been hacked. Visitors were being redirected to spam, browsers were showing a security warning, and the hosting provider had suspended the account, taking the site offline. I was brought in to remove the infection, close the way in, and get the site back online safely.

Diagnosis of the outage, including a check of the domain's DNS and hosting setup

Removal of malicious redirects and spam content

Cleanup of injected code in infected files

Removal of hidden backdoor files

Removal of admin accounts the owner never created

Security hardening after the cleanup

The site restored and back online

I handled the full recovery, working in the hosting account, the site's files and the WordPress database.

Diagnosis first. With the site offline, I started by comparing the domain's DNS and hosting setup with a working site on the same server. That separated hosting issues from problems inside WordPress itself, so the cleanup could focus in the right place.

Every trace removed, not just the visible ones. Spam and redirects are what visitors see, but attackers usually leave more behind. Alongside them, I removed injected code from infected files, hidden backdoor files that would have let the attackers back in, and admin accounts the owner never created. Cleaning only the visible symptoms would have left the door open.

Hardened against the next attempt. After the cleanup, I secured the site with:

a security plugin with firewall and login protection

WordPress core, plugins and themes brought up to date

all passwords reset

unused plugins and themes removed

Back online. With the infection gone, the hosting account is active again and the website is working for the company's customers.

Stack: WordPress · Security plugin (firewall & login protection) · Hosting control panel · DNS