We got a site on stretch ceilings that was constantly hacked. Now we are going to tell you how we rescued it.
Domain age: 13 years.
Start date: 19 Aug Oct 2018.
Minimum goal: to increase sales and improve positions.
Maximum goal: redesign and turn into a market leader.
Site status
This site was also promoted by the studio, which the customer was not satisfied with. When transferring access, it turned out that the site is located on completely different hosting; we had to go through all the emails and restore access to it. The site was built with Joomla! and suffered from constant hacks and spam.
Upon the expiration of the contract with the old contractors for SEO services, they tried to convince the client with a “link explosion”:
The links were of sufficient quality, so it doesn’t seem like it was maliciously done.
What was done
Convinced the client on another redesign and transferred to CMS WordPress. Because no one has been able to fix it before us, and our attempts to clean the viruses and protect the site were unsuccessful. We did a redesign in the shortest time possible because every day, we had to restore the site from the backup because of the hacking; not a single contact form worked because of the hosting blocking due to spam. We immediately moved to a new hosting. The current one had weak tech support and capabilities.
Many studios transfer their clients to partner hosting services, without thinking about clients, for a decent percentage of their balance replenishment.
During the redesign, we also made some significant changes:
- Configured canonical on every page with an absolute URL.
- Set up pagination. Rel = “next / prev” and canonical to the first pagination page (without parameters, for example &page = 1 or / page / 1).
- It was removed on all pages.
- We added a spring mood: we added leaves to the logo and an autumn banner.
- We moved to another hosting.
- We restored all accesses.
- We cleaned viruses and continuously monitored the site for attacks.
- All spam pages were assigned a 404-server response and removed from the index.