Since mid-2017, WordPress has officially asked their customers to use PHP 7.2 or higher. In other words, the PHP version your website runs on directly affects the security, speed, and performance of your site. All these changes are responsible for optimizing the processing and delivery of your website content. As a result, the PHP developer community is updating and patching it for bug and security vulnerabilities continually. PHP Version Is Especially Critical for WordPress: Being open source programming language, PHP is a live project. But most importantly, as these old versions will not continue to receive security patches, your website will be exposed to security breaches. These seemingly minor updates have helped to make PHP a competitive and evolving programming language.Īs the minimum PHP requirements for WordPress core increase, many plugins and themes compatible with older versions of PHP will be rendered useless. PHP 7 and higher versions have replaced many deprecated functions with new and advanced features such as anonymous classes, throwable errors, and type declarations among others.
This upgrade primarily focuses on removing functionality deprecated in previous versions and improving language consistency. The PHP development community has made the efforts to make migration as easy as possible. It comes with new features, functions, and improvements that will allow us to write better code. The PHP community released the PHP 7.2 on November 30, 2017. If you belong to the 75% of the people using PHP 7.1 or 7.0, you can start upgrading your website to the latest version of PHP.
Out of those using PHP 7.0 or higher versions, only 23.9% use PHP 7.2 while a just 0.1% use PHP 7.3 version. According to W3Tech, 78.9% of all the websites they have surveyed use PHP with only 19.1% using PHP 7.0 or higher version.
As a result, upgrading to PHP 7.2 becomes crucial. Unfortunately, after December 2018, PHP will no longer offer critical security support and updates for some of the older versions of PHP. PHP takes care of running internal functions and process database information for WordPress sites.