is my traffic really up and down like this?

Hi DeeDee,

Thanks for using Independent Analytics!

I’m sorry to hear about the malware attack. If your site was redirecting elsewhere, then our plugin wouldn’t have been able to track those visits. Do you think the timing of the redirect would line up with your low-traffic days?

AWStats works quite a bit different because it mainly tracks “hits,” which includes every request to the server, like a request to load an image or a Javascript file. It would make sense to me that those stats are fairly consistent during the redirect because your site would still get requested and load some resources before the visitor is redirected elsewhere, while Independent Analytics wouldn’t have a chance to load.

It’s having low traffic today and yesterday. Personally, I haven’t seen evidence that people are still getting redirected. Well, someone on fivr said that the site is redirecting–but I haven’t been able to repeat that/don’t know if they are being honest.

Yea, that makes sense about the awstats.

I’m not seeing a redirect when I visit the site now, but it is worrying that it was redirecting to spam sites. I would recommend installing a plugin like Wordfence if you haven’t already to protect the site. It would also be a good idea to update any plugins and themes that have an update available, and also re-install WordPress for good measure. That part is much easier than it sounds – there’s a button in the Dashboard > Updates menu you can click to re-install.

Keep an eye on your traffic over the next week and if you continue to see weird variations, let me know and I can help to further debug this.

Thank you Ben.

Yesterday I installed clean talk security plugin and just now I deleted inactive plugin and reinstalled wordpress.

But I also have this warning, saying my site might not be visible to search engines.

Zero traffic yesterday and none today, so far.

I just viewed a few pages, and the tracking script is running successfully for my visit (screenshot). Can you check if my views show up in your dashboard today?

I think that error message is saying there was an error with the process of checking if your site can be found by search engines, not that it is actually blocking them. It is possible to block search engines with this setting, but I’m guessing that’s probably not the case.

Idk my site was visited like 10 times in the past hour (way less than usual).

I googled “polymeric sand flagstone” –a term that I rank for–and I was on the first page as expected. Clicked it–and was taken to a spam site.

Tried again, and was taken to my site.

Hmm okay I see that too. It looks like a direct visit to the site works fine, but when someone visits from a search engine, the site is getting redirected. That would explain the large drop in traffic.

I’m not a security expert myself, but it looks like this is a common form of malware. I would recommend following a guide like this one or reaching out to a security specialist to remove the malware.