If you run into any issues whilst doing this or need help, you should contact a professional web developer, your hosting company, or your theme and plugins authors.
Run through these steps, and you’ll be ready to update the PHP version on your WordPress site – and enjoy all of the benefits that come with this! If they can’t or won’t get back to you, have a look for themes or plugins on with similar functionality and use one of these instead.
? When done, check your site is working as expected.
In order to revert this backup, you’ll also need your web host to move your PHP version back to your current version (we’ll cover how to do this later). There are plenty of free backup plugins available, so if you don’t have a backup solution already – use one of these.
Older versions of PHP do not have this, so updating is essential to keep your WordPress site secure.Īnd then there are a number of secondary benefits: Because PHP is so popular, it is a target for hackers – but the latest version will have the latest security features. PHP, like WordPress, is maintained by its community. Updating to the latest supported version (currently 7.4) can deliver a huge performance increase up to 3 or 4x faster for older versions.