Blog

Posts

• How to move your WordPress site to PHP7 from an older version of PHP

  May 15, 2017

  There are a few steps to move your WordPress site to PHP7. Recently I have been doing these migrations for clients and my own website, from PHP5.x, to PHP7. So I am sharing the steps it took to get there and some tools that help and pitfalls to avoid. Your first question may be why would want to move your WordPress site to PHP7? There are a couple good reasons. First, looks like WordPress will be bumping up the WordPress from 5.6 to 7.0 by the middle of 2017. As you might know, PHP is the server-side scripting language which WordPress core, themes, and plugins are written in. WordPress is already coded and able to run on PHP 7. Speed is the second reason. PHP7 was built to compete with Facebook’s HVVM and from benchmarks, it looks like it as least twice as fast as the previous version of PHP. On Yoast’s blog there are even more reasons if you want to dig deeper into it. Some of you may be asking what happened to PHP 6? If you have not already made the move, currently you are likely hosting your website some 5.x version of PHP. PHP6 was in development but met some snags during the implementation of language-integrated Unicode. So, the development team scrapped 6 and started on a new version. At this point, the PHP core team was compelled to seriously think about the name of the new major release. And finally, after a vote in July…
  Read the entire post