In 2026, the volume of attacks on WordPress sites has reached an all-time high, largely driven by AI-powered automation that allows hackers to scan millions of sites per hour.

Here are the most striking statistics on how often your site is likely being targeted:

1. The Global Attack Volume

  • 90,000 Attempts per Minute: Across the internet, WordPress sites face approximately 90,000 attack attempts every single minute.
  • 13,000 Hacks per Day: An estimated 13,000 WordPress sites are successfully compromised every day (roughly 4.7 million per year).
  • 6.4 Billion Brute Force Attempts: Monthly, security networks like Wordfence block over 6.4 billion attempts to “guess” passwords on WordPress login pages.

2. The “Average” Site Pressure

  • 30,000 Attempts per Day: Even a small, low-traffic blog can expect roughly 30,000 automated hacking attempts daily. These aren’t personal attacks; they are “bad bots” searching for easy doors.
  • 31% of Your Traffic is Bots: About 1 in every 3 visitors to your site right now is likely a bot. Of those, roughly 40% are “bad bots” designed to steal data, scrape content, or find vulnerabilities.

3. The Race Against Time (The 5-Hour Rule)

  • 5-Hour Median: In 2026, the “weighted median time” from a plugin vulnerability being announced to it being mass-exploited is only 5 hours.
  • Exploit Speed: 20% of top-targeted vulnerabilities are actively attacked within 6 hours of discovery. If you aren’t using automated updates, you are likely already too late by the time you read the news.

4. Where They Are Getting In

  • 91% Plugins: The vast majority of successful breaches occur through vulnerable plugins.
  • 6% Themes: Theme vulnerabilities account for a smaller but significant portion.
  • <1% Core: WordPress itself is remarkably secure; in 2025, there were only 6 confirmed vulnerabilitiesin the core software compared to over 11,000 in plugins.

5. The Financial Impact

  • $2,800 Cleanup Cost: The average cost to professionally clean and restore a hacked WordPress site is currently around $2,800.
  • $14,500 Total Loss: For small businesses, once you factor in downtime, lost sales, and SEO damage, the average recovery cost jumps to $14,500.

Summary: You aren’t being targeted because you’re famous; you’re being targeted because you exist on a platform that powers 43.5% of the web. The “attacker” is almost always a script running on a server thousands of miles away, looking for any site that hasn’t updated its plugins in the last 24 hours.