The short answer: a one-off professional clean-up of a typical WordPress site costs between about $100 and $500 (roughly £100 to £400). A yearly security plan that includes clean-ups mostly costs between $229 and $660 a year, with round-the-clock response plans costing over $1,000. Doing it yourself costs nothing but time, and carries the biggest risk of the hack coming back.
What you actually pay depends less on the malware and more on three things: how much of the job is done by a person rather than a script, whether the way in gets closed, and whether a reinfection is covered.
All the prices below were checked on each company’s own website on 3 November 2026. Prices change, so follow the links before you buy.
What you’ll pay, by type of help
There are five ways to get a hacked WordPress site cleaned up.
| Type of help | Typical cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself | Free, plus several hours | Developers who know WordPress files and databases well |
| Automatic clean-up in a security plugin | From $299 a year | Common infections on a site you’ll keep protected |
| One-off clean-up by a specialist | $98 to $499 per incident | A one-time hack on a site you’ll look after yourself afterwards |
| Yearly plan with clean-ups included | $229 to $660 a year | Sites that earn money, or sites that have been hacked before |
| An agency or freelancer, by the hour | Quoted per job | Sites with lots of custom code |
Real prices from well-known providers
| Provider | Price | What you get | Reinfection covered? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sucuri one-time clean-up | $98 per site, one-off | Clean-up by an analyst, a report, help with blocklist removal. First response within 30 hours | No |
| CleanTalk malware removal | $119 per site, one-off | Clean-up by a specialist, plus a year of CleanTalk’s security plugin | 30 days of help |
| WebAdish (UK) | From £129, or from £299 for WooCommerce | Clean-up, password and key reset, Google review request | 30 days (60 for WooCommerce) |
| Wurdey | $499 flat | Clean-up by an engineer, reply within 4 business hours, entry point closed | Not stated |
| MalCare Repair | $299 a year | Automatic clean-up and report, expert reply within 24 hours. Manual fixes need Fortify, $499 a year | Yes, while subscribed |
| Sucuri Platform | $229, $339 or $549 a year | Unlimited clean-ups and a cloud firewall. Faster response on dearer plans (30, 12 or 6 hours) | Yes, unlimited |
| Wordfence Care | $590 a year ($1,250 for Response) | Incident response by a Wordfence analyst, blocklist removal and SEO clean-up | Yes |
| Pressfort | $660 a year (£500 + VAT in the UK), or $66 a month | Two clean-ups a year, plus the existing infection on the yearly plan. Daily backups, staging-tested updates and a developer when needed | Yes, two a year |
Notice the gap between Sucuri’s $98 one-off and its $229 yearly plan. A one-off clean-up buys one incident. If the site is hacked again next month, you pay again.
What a proper clean-up should include
Comparing prices only makes sense if you’re comparing the same job. Before you pay anyone, check that the price covers:
- A backup before anything changes, so nothing you need is lost in the clean-up.
- Files and the database. Malware often hides in the database as well as in files: injected scripts in posts, rogue settings and scheduled tasks. A clean-up that only scans files can miss half of it.
- Backdoors, not just the visible symptom. The spam redirect is what you notice. The hidden file that put it there is what brings it back.
- Closing the way in. Updating or replacing the vulnerable plugin, removing unknown admin users and changing passwords and security keys.
- A request to lift Google’s warning if your site shows “This site may be hacked” or a red browser warning.
- A written report of what was found, what was removed and how the attacker got in.
- What happens if it comes back. A 30-day re-clean guarantee is common for one-off clean-ups. Yearly plans usually cover reinfections for as long as you’re subscribed.
If a quote leaves out closing the way in, it isn’t cheaper. It just moves the cost to the next hack.
What pushes the price up
Most “from” prices are for a straightforward site with one infection. Expect to pay more, or be quoted separately, if:
- It’s an online shop. WooCommerce sites have order and customer tables to check, and payment scripts that need to be verified as untouched. WebAdish, for example, starts at £129 for a standard site and £299 for WooCommerce.
- There are several sites in one hosting account. An infection usually spreads between them, and cleaning one while leaving its neighbours infected doesn’t work.
- Google has indexed spam pages. Pharma, casino or Japanese spam pages need removing and returning “not found”, or they linger in search results for weeks.
- Your host has suspended the account. Getting it back needs a clean-up report the host will accept.
- There’s no clean backup. Without one, everything has to be cleaned by hand rather than restored.
- It’s been hacked before. Repeat hacks usually mean a deeper backdoor, a stolen password or an abandoned plugin, and finding it takes longer.
- It needs doing now. Faster response usually costs more. Sucuri’s yearly plans, for example, go from a 30-hour to a 6-hour target as the price goes up.
The costs that aren’t on the invoice
The clean-up is often the smallest bill. While a site is hacked, it can also cost you:
- Sales and enquiries. Visitors redirected to spam don’t buy, and most people turn back at a red “Deceptive site ahead” warning.
- Search rankings. Google’s “This site may be hacked” label puts people off clicking, and spam pages can push your real pages down.
- Advertising. Google Ads stops showing ads that lead to a compromised site until it’s fixed.
- Email. Hacked sites are often used to send spam, which can land your own emails in junk folders.
- Time. Talking to your host, your customers and Google while it’s all going on.
That’s why the speed of the response, and stopping it happening again, are usually worth more than saving $50 on the clean-up itself.
Can you remove WordPress malware for free?
Yes, if you’re comfortable working with WordPress files, the database and your hosting control panel. Free scanners from Wordfence, Sucuri and others will help you find infected files. Deciding what’s safe to delete, and finding what they miss, is up to you. Our step-by-step guide covers what to do and in what order: WordPress site hacked? Here’s what to do first.
The risk with doing it yourself is the partial clean-up: the visible malware is gone, but a backdoor remains and the site is reinfected within days. If you go this way, spend as much time on closing the way in as on removing the malware. Checking your plugins against known vulnerabilities is a good place to start.
One-off clean-up or a yearly plan?
A one-off clean-up makes sense if the site isn’t critical to your business, you know how the attacker got in, and you’ll keep WordPress, plugins and themes updated yourself from now on. Sucuri’s $98 and CleanTalk’s $119 clean-ups are the cheapest ways to get a person onto the job.
A yearly plan makes sense if the site earns money or brings in leads, it’s been hacked before, or nobody is really keeping on top of updates. Most hacks come through an out-of-date plugin, so a clean-up without ongoing updates and protection is a fix with an expiry date. Two one-off clean-ups in a year already cost about as much as the cheapest yearly plan.
Look at what else the plan replaces. If you already pay separately for backups, uptime monitoring or someone to run updates, a plan that includes them can cost less overall than its headline price suggests.
Where Pressfort fits
Pressfort isn’t the cheapest way to fix a single hack. If that’s all you need, a one-off clean-up from Sucuri or CleanTalk costs less.
It’s built for the second question: keeping the site clean afterwards. On the yearly plan, cleaning up a site that’s already infected when you join is included and doesn’t use up either of the two clean-ups you get each year. If we can’t get it clean, we refund you in full. After that, the firewall, virtual patching and staging-tested updates close the usual ways in, and daily backups kept for 90 days mean there’s always a clean copy to go back to. On the monthly plan, we’ll try an automatic clean-up of an existing infection for free, then quote for anything that needs doing by hand.
You can see how it compares with the bigger names on our Sucuri and Wordfence comparison pages. Not sure your site is actually hacked? Start with a free security check.