So recently a 0-day exploit was discovered in WP plugin Kaswara Modern WP Bakery Page (https://zdnet.com/article/...).

A customer's shared hosting space was taken down (about 6 websites) after this vulnerability had been exploited and although we removed the malicious code, & changed credentials the hosting company demands we update ALL Wordpress plugins to latest AND provide them a virus scan report of our local PC before putting the webspace back online??? WTF???

That just strikes me as outrageous. Thoughts?

9 Ways to Improve Your Website in 2020

Online customers are very picky these days. Plenty of quality sites and services tend to spoil them. Without leaving their homes, they can carefully probe your company and only then decide whether to deal with you or not. The first thing customers will look at is your website, so everything should be ideal there.

Not everyone succeeds in doing things perfectly well from the first try. For websites, this fact is particularly true. Besides, it is never too late to improve something and make it even better.
In this article, you will find the best recommendations on how to get a great website and win the hearts of online visitors.

Take care of security

It is unacceptable if customers who are looking for information or a product on your site find themselves infected with malware. Take measures to protect your site and visitors from new viruses, data breaches, and spam.

Take care of the SSL certificate. It should be monitored and updated if necessary.

Be sure to install all security updates for your CMS. A lot of sites get hacked through vulnerable plugins. Try to reduce their number and update regularly too.

Ride it quick

Webpage loading speed is what the visitor will notice right from the start. The war for milliseconds just begins. Speeding up a site is not so difficult. The first thing you can do is apply the old proven image compression. If that is not enough, work on caching or simplify your JavaScript and CSS code. Using CDN is another good advice.

Choose a quality hosting provider

In many respects, both the security and the speed of the website depend on your hosting provider. Do not get lost selecting the hosting provider. Other users share their experience with different providers on numerous discussion boards.

Content is king

Content is everything for the site. Content is blood, heart, brain, and soul of the website and it should be useful, interesting and concise. Selling texts are good, but do not chase only the number of clicks. An interesting article or useful instruction will increase customer loyalty, even if such content does not call to action.

Communication

Broadcasting should not be one-way. Make a convenient feedback form where your visitors do not have to fill out a million fields before sending a message. Do not forget about the phone, and what is even better, add online chat with a chatbot and\or live support reps.

Refrain from unpleasant surprises

Please mind, self-starting videos, especially with sound may irritate a lot of visitors and increase the bounce rate. The same is true about popups and sliders.

Next, do not be afraid of white space. Often site owners are literally obsessed with the desire to fill all the free space on the page with menus, banners and other stuff. Experiments with colors and fonts are rarely justified. Successful designs are usually brilliantly simple: white background + black text.

Mobile first

With such a dynamic pace of life, it is important to always keep up with trends, and the future belongs to mobile devices. We have already passed that line and mobile devices generate more traffic than desktop computers. This tendency will only increase, so adapt the layout and mind the mobile first and progressive advancement concepts.

Site navigation

Your visitors should be your priority. Use human-oriented terms and concepts to build navigation instead of search engine oriented phrases.

Do not let your visitors get stuck on your site. Always provide access to other pages, but be sure to mention which particular page will be opened so that the visitor understands exactly where and why he goes.

Technical audit

The site can be compared to a house - you always need to monitor the performance of all systems, and there is always a need to fix or improve something. Therefore, a technical audit of any project should be carried out regularly. It is always better if you are the first to notice the problem, and not your visitors or search engines.

As part of the audit, an analysis is carried out on such items as:

● Checking robots.txt / sitemap.xml files
● Checking duplicates and technical pages
● Checking the use of canonical URLs
● Monitoring 404 error page and redirects

There are many tools that help you monitor your website performance and run regular audits.

Conclusion

I hope these tips will help your site become even better. If you have questions or want to share useful lifehacks, feel free to comment below.

Resources:

https://networkworld.com/article/...

https://webopedia.com/TERM/C/...

https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/...

https://macsecurity.net/view/...