Hi this is Jessica with Tiny Frog Technologies and today I’d like to talk a little bit about WordPress and PHP. Now if you have a WordPress site you’ve probably heard the term PHP but it can sound kind of like a technical jargon. And I wanted to explain what is PHP in very simple terms because it’s really important actually to your website.
What is PHP?
In a nutshell PHP is a server-side coding language. And it’s the most popular one in the world. Actually 80% of all web sites, not just WordPress sites, but all web sites are built using PHP. And in the WordPress environment everything is built on PHP – every plug-in, theme, every site. So basically without PHP your WordPress site won’t exist. You may be hearing a lot about PHP updates right now so just like any plugin or theme or software out there the PHP code has different updates released for it. Usually about once or twice a year a new update is released and if you don’t update your whole site to the latest PHP version you can actually start to have a lot of security issues and performance issues.
The big challenge in the WordPress community is that you don’t have any special warning if your site needs to be updated to the latest PHP. If you log into your WordPress dashboard there’s no big red symbol to update the site. And actually if you’re not a WordPress developer it can be difficult to figure out what version of PHP your site is running on. WordPress is trying to fix this, and in a new update coming out for the WordPress core – it’s going to be update 5.2. They’re going to change the dashboard and actually show a warning if your site is running on an outdated version of PHP. So once you run that update and if you see that warning, it’s really important to work with a developer or a development company and make sure you update the site to the latest version of PHP.
If you have any questions about this or you aren’t sure if your site’s running on the latest version of PHP – feel free to reach out to our team.
