Carefully follow this guide. When you’re done, you may want to implement some (if not all) of the recommended security measures and start backing up your site.
I have already followed this guide from another post, there is no malware on my site. I have also contacted my host and there is nothing on their end that would cause this. The issue is something else that I can’t find.
There’s more in that guide besides scanning for malware.
Do you still have ads after a fresh install of the WordPress files, your plugins, and your theme (don’t forget to back that one up first)?
Yes I’ve done all of those things and the ads are still showing up
If you create a new WordPress installation on the same server (use a subdomain, like test.littleupgrades.com), do you also see ads in the Dashboard of that fresh installation?
I’ve already contacted my host and there’s nothing on their end that’s causing the issue. I have a different website on the same server also with wordpress and it is not having this issue.
Then the issue is limited to just that one install.
A .htaccess rule could be the source of the problem. To check for this, access your server via SFTP or FTP or a file manager in your hosting account’s control panel, and rename the .htaccess file to htaccess (remove the dot).
If you can’t find a .htaccess file, ensure that you have set your SFTP or FTP client to view invisible files.
Start with the file in your site’s root, and if that makes no difference, look for and try the same thing with the file in /wp-admin/.
I added a file manager plug in to wordpress to access those files. When I click on the .htaccess file to edit it I get a pop up that says “403 Forbidden” and under it it says ngnix.
I also get the same error when I try to access the .user.ini file but no others
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This reply was modified 2 years, 4 months ago by
lesyarde42.
I was able to rename the file in the public html section to remove the dot and the ads are still appearing. I can’t find the htaccess file under the wp-admin section. Do you have any resources that show how to do this?
Thank you for all your help!
If there’s no file in wp-admin then there’s nothing to worry about.
The next thing to do, assuming you really did reinstall all core files already, is to rebuild your wp-config.php file.
To do that, download a fresh copy of WordPress from https://wordpress.org/download/
Use a plain text editor to edit the wp-config-sample.php file and fill out the database name, username, password, and host with information from your hosting account’s control panel: https://developer.wordpress.org/apis/wp-config-php/#configure-database-settings
You might need to make sure that the database prefix matches too: https://developer.wordpress.org/apis/wp-config-php/#table-prefix
Once that’s done, rename that file to wp-config.php, delete the version of that file from your server, and upload this new version.
Sorry for the long response, I’m not sure which thing I did fixed it but everything is running smoothly now and I no longer have ads in the admin side. Thank you for all your help!
Just kidding they are back again today after about a week of being gone. Again I haven’t changed anything since they weren’t showing up for a while. I have no idea what to do next, is there someone I can have look over my website and see if there are any issues in the code or files? I’m not confident enough in my abilities on the back end to do what you’ve described without messing something up.
If you need to, you can hire someone at https://jobs.wordpress.net and don’t accept any hire or direct access offers on these forums (as they would be posted against forum rules).
