How much does it cost to fix a hacked website?

Search “fix hacked website cost” and you will mostly find two extremes: free plugin marketing pages, or agencies hiding their price behind a contact form. The real market has four tiers, and the gap between the first two and the last one is exactly where most small sites get stuck overpaying or under-fixing. If you are not sure whether your site is actually compromised right now, start with our website hacked guide to confirm the signs before you spend anything.

The middle tier is the gap almost nobody fills. Plugin subscriptions are cheap but automated; agencies are thorough but priced for businesses with a much bigger budget and a much bigger site. A small WordPress blog or a single Shopify store rarely needs either extreme — it needs a human to actually look at it, once, properly.

• Human hours vs. automation — a scanner costs pennies to run at scale; a person manually tracing how malware got onto your server and reading your actual code takes real, billable time. That is the single biggest cost driver at every tier.
• Root-cause investigation — deleting the malicious files takes minutes. Working out which plugin, theme, weak password, or misconfiguration let the attacker in takes considerably longer, and it is the part that prevents a repeat.
• Site size and complexity — a five-page brochure site and a WooCommerce store with fifty plugins are not the same job. More code, more integrations, more places malware can hide.
• Sales and account overhead — agency quotes include scoping calls, project managers and custom contracts. None of that makes the cleanup better; it is why productized, fixed-scope services can charge a fraction of the price for comparable hands-on work.
• Ongoing cover vs. one-off — a subscription plugin bills you every year regardless of whether anything happens. A one-time audit with a fixed cover window (like Bug Circuit’s 3-month Signal plan) is a single payment for the period you actually need extra attention — right after an incident.

This is the part most price comparisons skip. A cleanup-only service — whether it is a free plugin or a paid one — treats the symptom: it finds known malware and deletes it. It does not, as a rule, tell you why your site was hackable in the first place. That is how a huge number of small sites end up paying for the same cleanup two, three, or four times a year.

A root-cause audit works backwards from the infection: which plugin was out of date, which admin password was reused, which file permission was wrong, which contact form was unpatched. Fixing that specific hole is what actually stops the reinfection cycle — and it is the difference between a $100 annual subscription that keeps mopping up and a one-time $49–$299 audit that closes the door. If your site has been cleaned before and got hacked again, that is almost always the missing step — see why WordPress sites keep getting hacked for the common repeat-offender causes, including the Japanese keyword hack that specifically thrives on cleanup-without-root-cause.

If you are confident and technical

Take a full backup first, then use a reputable free or low-cost scanner to identify flagged files. Compare file timestamps against your last known-good backup, remove anything unfamiliar, rotate every password and API key, and update everything. This can work, but it is genuinely time-consuming and it is easy to miss a backdoor — a single overlooked file can mean you are hacked again within days.

If you want it handled properly, without agency pricing

This is the gap Bug Circuit exists for. Start with our free passive check — no login, no card — to confirm whether anything critical is visible right now. From there, the $49 Circuit plan gets a human engineer to manually audit the whole site and hand you a written, ranked report. The $299 Signal plan (currently 55% off as a launch offer) adds our team actually fixing the high and critical issues with you, plus 3 months of continued cover so a second incident does not mean a second invoice.

If your business is larger or under a compliance mandate

If you handle significant volumes of customer payment data, operate under a compliance framework that names an accredited incident-response firm, or run a complex multi-system application, the $500–$3,000+ agency tier is the right call — no discount changes that, and we would tell you so directly if you asked us.

• You are on a rolling security-plugin subscription and your site still keeps getting reinfected — you are paying to mop up the same puddle instead of fixing the leak.
• A vendor quoted a price before asking a single question about your site’s size, platform or what was actually found — that number is not based on your job.
• The quote bundles a year of “monitoring” you did not ask for onto a one-time cleanup, inflating the price well past what the actual work costs.
• Nobody can tell you how the attacker got in. If the explanation is only “we removed the malware,” the root cause — and the price of fixing it properly — is still sitting unaddressed.