Since the launch of PHP7 in December 2015, we’ve been quietly working at upgrading our servers (and all our sites) from PHP5.6 (and at the same time upgrading to MySQL 5.7). We’re pleased to say it’s now complete and all (*) our sites, including our WordPress installations, are running on PHP7.
Although the upgrade process itself had been reasonably simple, it has taken a while to deal with incompatibilities and issues thrown up by the upgrade. There are a number of reasons for the move, but the biggest one is the speed improvement PHP7 delivers: it varies from site to site but PHP7 is estimated to be 100% quicker than PHP5.6!
It seems we’re well ahead of the curve for our clients: as of today, although 82% of websites worldwide use PHP, just over 1% of sites are using PHP7. We’re fairly sure that figure will increase really rapidly soon – it’s well worth doing.
Finally, we’ve not charged any of our clients for this upgrade: keeping our sites on the latest (or most suitable) version of the available software is part of our support package for our hosted sites.
(*) OK – there is one we haven’t upgraded as it has a PHP5 dependent third party library (and thus upgrading would break it!). Sometimes, knowing when not to upgrade is as important as knowing when to do so!