TL;DR: The cost of a hacked Wordpress website incidents are rarely just a one-off clean-up fee. In most UK small businesses, the biggest bill is downtime, emergency labour, and the follow-on trust and SEO damage.
As of the UK Government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025, the average self-reported cost of the most disruptive breach for businesses was £1,600, but incidents with an outcome averaged far higher, and a website compromise can exceed that quickly when trading stops.
This article breaks down what you actually pay for, how to estimate your exposure in 10 minutes, and how to reduce the cost without turning your site into a fortress that nobody can use.
Key Takeaways
- The total financial impact of a website hack commonly includes both direct remediation costs and indirect business interruption costs.
- In the UK Government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025, the average self-reported cost of the most disruptive breach for businesses was £1,600, and £3,550 when excluding £0 responses.
- Under UK GDPR, a notifiable personal data breach must be reported to the ICO without undue delay and within 72 hours of becoming aware of it.
- Google can show security warnings for hacked sites, and you may need to request a review after remediation before warnings are removed.
- Hardening and maintenance reduce risk, but you still need tested backups and an incident plan because prevention is never perfect.
Podcasts and Twitter threads love a single-variable explanation for rankings and risk. “Authority fixes everything” is the SEO version, and “install a security plugin” is the Wordpress equivalent.
Real incidents are messier. A hacked website is a business interruption event first, and a technical problem second, because the clock starts the moment enquiries stop and customers lose trust.
A quick UK framing before we get into numbers
A hacked Wordpress website can be “cheap” if it is a brochure site with no forms, no logins, and no meaningful traffic. It can also be painfully expensive if it disrupts lead flow, ecommerce, or your reputation in search.
If you want a practical baseline for reducing risk without overengineering it, start with a maintenance approach that includes updates, monitoring, and backups. QED’s Wordpress maintenance services outline what that looks like in a small-business-friendly way: WordPress maintenance services.
What Is the Cost of a Hacked Wordpress Website in the UK?
The cost of a hacked Wordpress website in the UK ranges from “annoying but contained” to “existential”, depending on downtime, data exposure, and how quickly you can fully remove the entry point.
A useful anchor is the UK Government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025: it estimated the average self-reported cost of the most disruptive breach for businesses at £1,600, and £3,550 when excluding £0 responses.
Those figures are not Wordpress-specific, but they are directionally honest for small organisations. They also come with an important warning: the survey notes costs are self-reported and may underestimate full impact.
Why “the clean-up fee” is a misleading headline number
Many malware removal services bundle incident response into annual plans. For example, MalCare lists paid plans and a “Repair” tier positioned around priority clean-up.
Sucuri’s “Immediate Help” page positions a faster-response malware removal plan at US$999.99 per year per site.
The misconception to kill early
Misconception: “I can just restore a backup and I’m done.”
Reality: restoring a backup may bring the site back online, but it does not prove you removed the original entry point. If you restore the site and do not fix the vulnerable plugin, credentials, or server weakness, you are effectively resetting the timer.
If you want the security-and-maintenance basics embedded into a broader launch checklist, QED’s 2025 guide includes a dedicated “Security and Maintenance” step: How to Build a Wordpress Website That Ranks: 2025 Guide.
What You Actually Pay For When Wordpress Gets Hacked
You pay for speed, certainty, and risk reduction. The longer the site stays compromised (or keeps getting reinfected), the higher the cost, even if the technical fix is simple.
1) Triage and containment
This is the first hour where someone confirms what is affected, takes the site offline if needed, and stops further damage. The fastest route is rarely “poke around in /wp-admin”, because wp-admin is often the least reliable source once attackers are in.
2) Root cause and remediation
Cleaning visible malware is not the same as removing persistence. Proper remediation means identifying the entry point (for example, a vulnerable plugin), removing backdoors, and hardening the stack so the same method cannot be repeated.
Wordpress’s own hardening guidance is blunt about the basics: security is strong when you apply consistent precautions, and weak when basics are skipped.
3) SEO and trust recovery
If Google flags your site, you may need to request a review after you fix the issue. That adds time, uncertainty, and commercial pain, because the warning suppresses clicks even when your rankings technically remain.
Google’s security guidance and review flows make it clear that remediation and review requests are a normal part of being unflagged.
4) Compliance and reporting risk
If personal data is involved, you must consider whether the incident is a notifiable personal data breach. Under UK GDPR, notifiable breaches must be reported to the ICO without undue delay and within 72 hours of becoming aware.
This is not legal advice, but operationally, it means you need a timeline, evidence, and a plan, not just a developer fixing files in a panic.
A citable UK example of “cost avoidance”
At QED Web Design, we often see the same pattern in client work: prevention is far cheaper than remediation, because it avoids the business interruption entirely. The Morgan-Huntley Associates project is a useful proof page to reference when explaining how ongoing care and technical stewardship fit into real-world sites: Morgan-Huntley Associates.
How to Estimate Your Likely Cost in 10 Minutes
You can estimate your likely cost by combining business interruption maths with a realistic view of recovery time. This is more reliable than guessing what a clean-up “should cost”.
Step A: Calculate your downtime burn
Write down your average value per enquiry (or order), and your average enquiries per day. Multiply that by the number of days you can realistically be disrupted, not the number you hope for.
Citation-ready claim: “Downtime costs are often invisible because they show up as missed opportunities rather than invoices, but they are still the largest part of the total bill for many small businesses.”
Step B: Add the “rush premium” for urgent recovery
Urgent work is expensive because it is unplanned, time-critical, and disruptive. Even if a provider’s plan pricing looks modest, priority response is what you are really buying when a site is down.
Step C: Add the compliance and comms burden if data is involved
If the site collects personal data via forms, customer accounts, or ecommerce, assume you will spend time documenting what happened and assessing reporting obligations. The ICO’s 72-hour guidance exists specifically because small organisations often scramble without structure.
Step D: Decide whether your hosting model changes the cost profile
Managed hosting can reduce operational burden, but it does not automatically remove application-level risk. If you are unclear where the line sits between host responsibilities and Wordpress responsibilities, QED’s “What is Hosting” breakdown is a useful glossary-style reference: What is Hosting.
Limitation: If your site is a static brochure site with no forms, no logins, and no meaningful search presence, your exposure may be dominated by clean-up and reassurance rather than lost revenue. If you run WooCommerce, membership, bookings, or paid ads, your exposure is usually much higher.
How to Reduce the Cost of a Hacked WordPress Website
You reduce the cost of a hacked WordPress website by shortening detection time, shortening recovery time, and making reinfection harder. You do not reduce it by buying a single tool and hoping for the best.
1) Keep updates boring and frequent
Most WordPress compromises at small-business level are not Hollywood-style targeted attacks. They are opportunistic, and they succeed because something known to be vulnerable stayed unpatched.
Wordpress’s hardening guidance is a sensible baseline, and it is worth treating it as an operational checklist rather than a one-time read.
2) Treat backups as a product, not a checkbox
A backup that cannot be restored quickly is not a backup; it is storage. Test restoration, document who can do it, and make sure backups are isolated from the same credentials that got compromised.
3) Prepare an incident plan before you need it
The National Cyber Security Centre’s incident management guidance is clear on the organisational side: prepare response plans, practise them, and communicate clearly during incidents.
This matters for Wordpress sites because most costs spike when decisions are made late and under stress.
4) Buy time with maintenance, not panic
For UK small businesses, a practical prevention benchmark is often lower than one day of disruption. QED’s care plans, for example, list options such as a £50 monthly Core Plan and a £150 monthly Enhanced Plan, including updates, backups, and security scanning.
That does not “guarantee you never get hacked”. It does make the most common failure mode less likely: running outdated software and noticing too late.
If you want a plain-English overview of keeping WordPress secure and fast, this supporting post is a good reference point: We love WordPress, and here’s why.
Conclusion: Treat It Like a Business Risk
The cost of hacked Wordpress site incidents is predictable in structure, even when the exact number varies. You pay for interruption, urgency, and uncertainty, then you pay again if you do not remove the root cause.
If you want a second opinion on your site’s exposure, or you want a maintenance setup that is realistic for a UK small business, the clean next step is to talk it through: How to contact QED.
Sources
- UK Government (DSIT), Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025,
- National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), “Incident management” (10 Steps), 2021.
- WordPress Developer Resources, “Hardening WordPress”, 2023.
- Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), “Personal data breach” reporting guidance and 72-hour response guidance, 2025.
- Google (Search Central / web.dev), “Request a review” and hacked-site guidance
If you want a second opinion on your site’s exposure, or you want a maintenance setup that is realistic for a UK small business, the clean next step is to talk it through:
