A DDoS attack — short for Distributed Denial of Service — floods a website with an overwhelming amount of fake traffic, aiming to knock it offline or slow it to a crawl for real visitors.
The “distributed” part is key: instead of coming from one source, the traffic comes from thousands of compromised devices at once, making it much harder to block than an attack from a single location.
What It Looks Like From the Outside
A site under a DDoS attack often becomes extremely slow or completely unreachable, even though nothing is technically “broken” — the server is simply overwhelmed trying to respond to far more requests than it can handle.
Protecting a WordPress Site
Most protection happens at the hosting or network level rather than within WordPress itself. Services that sit in front of your site and filter suspicious traffic before it ever reaches your server are the most common defense.
Good hosting providers typically include some level of DDoS protection by default, which is one more reason choosing reliable hosting matters more than people often expect.