Have you been keeping up to date with your WordPress website’s PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) updates? If your answer to this question is no, or you simply don’t know exactly what this means, your site is not at all performing up to the best of its abilities. Whether it is speed and performance, support and compatibility, or most importantly overall site security, here are the benefits of keeping your PHP up-to-date!
Security
The key reason why you should get your PHP updated to the latest version is for the security on your WordPress site. The more recent the PHP that you are running on your site, the more protection you will be getting. As each version is rolled out, vulnerabilities identified in previous PHPs will have been remedied and patched, meaning the newer the version, the more security in place to protect your site.
Vulnerabilities that have been found to be present within PHP include DoS, code execution, SQL injection, XSS, and more types of exploits. All of these threats to your site’s security can be remedied with the most recent version of PHP.
Speed and Performance
The most recent iteration of PHP you can upgrade your site to is version 7.4.8, which was released in July 2020. If your site is actively running on a PHP that is below the current version, updating will bring immediate improvements to your speed and performance.
In fact, when PHP 7.0 was released it was recognized and praised for delivering substantial performance gains, allowing servers to execute twice as many requests per second than its predecessor PHP 5.6 at less than half the latency. Even more recently, the web host Kinstra compared PHP 5.6, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 in terms of performance, finding that PHP 7.3 could handle 3 times as many requests per second than the outdated version of PHP 5.6 when operating on a WordPress 5.0 site.
Support and Compatibility
Another major reason to update to the latest version of PHP is for continued support and improved compatibility. Like any and all software, developers will continue to support older versions for a certain amount of time until their focus is shifted solely on improving their most recent version. Actively supporting older versions of PHP is costly for developers, especially when it comes to plugins and themes. Developers want to continue to improve their most recent iteration of PHP, and continually going back to support outdated software keeps them from focusing on improving what they consider to be the best version of their product.
If you want your site’s PHP to continue to be supported and compatible with the most recent updates, upgrading should be a no brainer!
If you need assistance with updating your WordPress website’s PHP, or are interested in learning and understanding more about your site’s overall performance, the experts at idig are more than happy to help!
Get in contact with our web specialists now to start improving the performance of your site!
idig Marketing is a full-service digital development company that generates meaningful online traffic, drives high value leads to your organization, and builds and optimizes dynamic web assets. By optimizing organic content with paid advertising our custom methodology includes hosting, eCommerce and online security.
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