What Is PHP & What Do I Need To Know About It?

What Is PHP?

PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is a very widely used, open source scripting language, which was originally conceived way back in 1994. It is the foundation of WordPress, and much of the web in general. It allows for the creation of dynamic and interactive websites. The likes of Facebook, Wikipedia, Slack, Etsy use PHP, and so many more. It’s even used for many offline applications and software.

PHP evolved, but in 2014 a formal PHP specification was created, and is continuously worked on. According to W3Techs, as of April 2021 “PHP is used by 79.2% of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know’. It has been ported widely, and can be deployed on most servers. So it’s a pretty big deal.

What Do I Need To Know About PHP?

PHP receives regular updates to improve performance and security. Some of these updates are smaller branch updates (ie. 7.3 to 7.4), and some are much bigger new version releases (ie, 7, 8). 

These bigger version updates are permitted to break backward-compatibility of code, in order to make broader, more impactful changes. But these changes can also cause compatibility issues with websites built to work with older versions, where this backward-compatibility is broken. 

Luckily these larger version updates usually only occur every 5-10 years, with the smaller branch updates in between.

It is important to keep servers and websites up-to-date, with supported, compatible versions of PHP. They contain many new features and optimisations, which bring enhanced security and performance. We all know the importance of this when managing a digital critical business.

As new versions are released, older versions lose support, and become less secure. Web hosts have to deploy the latest versions to their servers to maintain a secure service with optimised performance. But this can have a knock on effect on hosted sites, if their codebase isn’t compatible with the PHP version of the server. Incompatibility can cause the despised ‘white screen of death’, non functioning areas of the website, and error messages, among other issues.

There is also the issue of plugins being incompatible. Some sites reliant on particular plugins that aren’t custom developed, will have to wait on the plugin developer to update their plugin to be compatible with the new PHP version. 

Premium plugins are often pretty on top of this, but smaller ones may take a while. This could mean looking for an alternative, or in many cases, it means websites have to sit on a server using the most recent branch of the previous PHP version until their plugins and codebase are compatible. Then they can be reliably ported to a server using the most recent version.

How Does It Affect My WordPress/WooCommerce Website?

These updates, especially the new version releases, will bring in big changes which will require development work to any PHP based websites or plugins to ensure they remain compatible with the latest, most secure PHP version.

As mentioned previously, these bigger version updates tend to only occur every 5-10 years, with the smaller branch updates happening in between, and requiring less development intervention.

The age of your site, it’s current PHP version and branch, the expertise of who built it, whether it has been updated recently, its size and complexity, the plugins it uses, etc. will all have a bearing on the amount of development required to polish its codebase to make it compatible with a new PHP version.

An audit can identify this, and provide you with a quote of how many hours of work will be required to bring your site up to scratch, for it to live on a server deployed with the most recent PHP version.

The newest version of PHP is 8, but 7.4 is still supported, giving hosting providers, website owners and plugin developers time to become compatible, due to this being a major version update. This will inevitably require development work for code compatibility, for most.

Is your WordPress site currently running the latest version of PHP? If not you should consider updating for: 

• Increased security
• Improvements to performance

If you’re not sure what version of PHP you are running, or whether your WordPress site is up-to-date and technically sound, consider one of our WordPress Health Check audits. We’ll delve into the technical set up, codebase, and hosting environment of your website, and audit it. We can then provide you with an in depth report on your website’s health, compatibility, security and performance.