Business Roundup Week Ending May 3

WordPress Plugin Directory Gets a Facelift, Needs a Bit More

This week, the WordPress plugin directory got a visual update “to standardize the site’s layout, fonts, spacing, and colors with other newly updated sections of WordPress.org.”
The changes look really good, in my opinion – the design team did an excellent job. But what I’d much rather see is an improvement to the poor quality of plugin search results.
For the last 10 years, I’ve done a monthly Plugin Roundup on Solid Academy (formerly iThemes Training). As I prepare each month, I find it harder and harder to locate plugins with the search tool.
Searching for a plugin, even by exact name, often doesn’t return the result you’re looking for in the top listings.
Popular plugins take precedence and others keyword-stuff their titles to gain rankings.
I’m grateful for the work that went into the new design. Could we do some work on the search algorithm, too?
What do you think about the quality of search results in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory?

ChatGPT’s new Memory feature allows it to remember personal details shared in conversations, enhancing its ability to provide context-rich answers.
Memory is enabled automatically but you can opt out, or control what it remembers in Settings under Personalization.
You can add facts to ChatGPT’s Memory directly by chatting with the bot or using specific prompts.
Memories can be removed individually or cleared entirely through the Settings or by request in a chat.
If you share a ChatGPT account with other team members in your Agency, you may want to turn off Memory to avoid mixing details about each user.

If you manage websites in your Agency like I do, you’re likely very familiar with the growing number of email notices about plugin vulnerabilities that hit your inbox.
In 2023, around 67% of these vulnerabilities were classified as medium-level severity. But what does that mean?
The severity level is determined using the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS Scores) based on a scale of 1-10.
Medium-level vulnerabilities are either difficult to exploit or provide limited benefits to attackers upon successful exploitation, so they are less likely to be used in large-scale attacks.
Many medium-severity vulnerabilities require contributor-level access, which many WordPress sites do not offer, making them less concerning for the majority of site owners.
While we should still update vulnerable extensions as soon as possible, there is not as much urgency at the medium-level as there is with high-severity vulnerabilities.
If you’re managing WordPress sites, it’s still as important as ever to stay informed about vulnerabilities, and implement proactive security measures at the network, server, and WordPress level.
Read more in this SearchEngineJournal article.

Google’s John Mueller explains what to do if your website gets de-indexed after a migration.
We know WordPress backups are critical. Here’s Patchstack’s list of the top backup plugins from a security perspective. They have a list of form plugins too.
Look at this in-depth comparison of the 15 fastest WordPress hosting providers with some surprising results.