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WordPress Hosting moves to PHP 7.3

22 October 2019

Tim Nash

As we wrote back in August we were awaiting the arrival of PHP 7.3 in the IUS repo to allow us to roll the new version out to all our WordPress Hosting clients. This has occurred and we have completed our testing so are now ready to begin deploying PHP 7.3. The PHP 7.3 rollout affects both PHP CLI and PHP-FPM inside your containers.

The biggest changes to PHP in version 7.3 are under the hood bringing some huge performance benefits to some WooCommerce powered sites, seeing a significant performance increases in their WordPress admin areas. For really intensive tasks this 10-15% performance increase might result in page load speeds reducing by seconds.

In addition, PHP 7.3 brings in new features for developers and while plugins on WordPress.org are unlikely to be able to immediately make use of these features, your own plugins and code should be.

Timeline

  • Starting the week of the 4th November, we will begin contacting clients with “deprecated” code letting them know what plugins/themes might need changing.
  • 11th November; any newly created containers (including migrations from another container) will be created with PHP 7.3 enabled.
  • 18th November; starting in the week of the 18th we will begin porting existing containers over to PHP 7.3.

What do you need to do?

Hopefully nothing! The amount of deprecated functions is low in comparison to previous updates. If we detect that you have code running with deprecated functions, we will be in touch with advice on what steps to take.

To help get ahead of such emails, making sure your plugins and themes that are not from the WordPress.org repo are up to date will minimise any potential issues.

Can you opt-out?

No. To maintain the high level of performance and to provide stability and security we move the WordPress Hosting as one to new versions of PHP so there is no option to opt-out of this upgrade.