It was Monday morning and I was on a call with a dozen others who are my peers. Each of us helps the small business owner with their businesses in one way or the other. It was at the end of the call and we were each sharing our websites and going over how to make little improvements here and there. Time was running out and there was just enough time for one more website review, I volunteered. As my site was coming up for all to see suddenly the screen turned a maroon red with an outline of a security officer with his hand stretched out and the words of"don't precede malware threat." I was horrified to recall exactly what it said although there was more. I was concerned I had spent hours on being destroyed plus humiliated that the people on the call had seen me vulnerable.
Cloning your site is another degree in fix malware problems free that can be very useful. Cloning simply means that you've backed up your site to a totally different place, (offline, as in a folder, in order not to have SEO issues ) where you can get it at a moment's notice if necessary.
There are numerous ways to pull this off, and a lot of them involve copying and FTPing files, exporting and re-establishing databases and more. Some of these are very complex, so it is imperative that you go for the right one. Then you might want to look into using a plugin for WordPress backups if you are not of the persuasion.
1 thing you can take is to delete the default administrator account. This is critical because if you don't do it, a user name which they could try to crack is already known by malicious user.
Note that this step for click new installations should only try. If you would like to do it for existing installations, you need to change of the table names within the database.
Do your homework and some hunting, but if you are pressed for time and want to get this try out the WordPress safety plugin that I use. It's a relief to know that my website (and business!) are secure.