WordPress Hosting: PHP 7.4 rollout plans

We have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of PHP 7.4 in the IUS repo to allow us to roll the new version out to all our WordPress Hosting clients. This has happened and we have completed our internal testing, so are now ready to begin deploying PHP 7.4. The PHP 7.4 rollout affects both PHP CLI and PHP-FPM inside your containers.

The biggest changes to PHP in version 7.4 are, like PHP 7.3, under the hood. These bring some performance benefits but also lay a lot of groundwork for PHP 8 which will be arriving towards the end of this year.

In addition, PHP 7.4 brings in new features for developers and while plugins on WordPress.org are unlikely to make immediate use of these features, your own plugins and code can.

Timeline

• Monday 3rd August; starting in the week of the 3rd August we will begin contacting clients with “deprecated” code letting them know what plugins/themes might need changing.
• Monday 10th August; any newly created containers (including migrations from another container) will be created with PHP 7.4 enabled.
• Monday 17th August; starting in the week of the 17th August we will begin porting existing containers over to PHP 7.4.

What do you need to do?

Hopefully nothing! The number 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.