Hello, this is Mikel Bruce with Tiny Frog Technologies and I’ve shot a couple of videos out in our parking lot in front of my car talking about website maintenance in relation to maintaining cars. And the analogy I want to use today is if you have a car and you get a recall notice from the manufacturer, it’s probably in your best interest to take the car in and get that fixed because if you don’t do that, you could have issues with your car.
How PHP Updates Affect Performance
And very similar on a WordPress website, WordPress is built with a program called PHP, which is the coding language that’s used. On a regular basis or with some frequency, PHP is being upgraded. And PHP has a recent upgrade to what’s a version called 7.2.
It’s very important, if you have a WordPress site, that your PHP is being updated or upgraded to PHP 7.2. If it’s an older version or if it’s deprecated, you’re definitely going to start to have some problems especially with security and performance. PHP updates can affect performance as sites running on outdated versions can have slower page speed scores.
So, upgrading your PHP on your WordPress site is critical. In fact, many hosting companies, at least the good ones, will discontinue your site or will not allow your site to be on their servers unless your site is upgraded to version 7.2. So this is something we’re doing, we’ve done for all of our clients.
We’re actually taking on projects currently or upgrading sites to PHP 7.2. So it’s definitely something to look at. Ask your developer about it. If your website is currently not upgraded or updated to version 7.2, it’s definitely something to look into and probably to get done sooner than later. And it’s not a lot of work. It’s kind of like a recall notice, you go in and it’s typically a handful of hours to upgrade the PHP.
If you have any questions on your WordPress site, or upgrading to the newest PHP version, definitely let us know.
Note: When we filmed this video, PHP 7.2 was the latest version. However, there are new PHP upgrades every few months. Please check the latest supported PHP version here or reach out to our team.
