We have now upgraded all hosting servers to support PHP 7, which you are able to easily activate per website from your konsoleH control panel – here’s how.
PHP is one of the most popular programming languages and is used by over 80% of all websites, so the chances are good that your website uses it too.
PHP 7 is the first major update in over a decade and provides an impressive increase in performance – it is twice as fast as the current version, 5.6. (Note: PHP 6 was not released, so version 5.6 is followed by version 7).
Although PHP 7 may provide some challenges in fixing old code or replacing old plugins, the impressive performance improvements will make the effort worthwhile.
Benefits
PHP7 has many benefits over PHP5.6. While features such as new spaceship and null coalescing operators may only be meaningful to developers, here are the real benefits for your website:
- Speed – sites load faster, which benefits visitors to your site as well as your Google ranking
- Uses less memory – which is particularly useful for mobile friendly applications
- Enables more concurrent connections – up to twice as many requests per second
Test for incompatibilities
The new version performs so much better because it has been optimised significantly and is therefore leaner and more efficient than previous versions. However this also means that support for some old components have been removed. If your website makes use of very old code, including some old WordPress plugins and themes, upgrading to PHP could cause your website to break.
How can I test my site?
You are able to toggle between the new and old PHP versions for your site from within konsoleH. We suggest that you activate PHP 7 and then check all aspects of your website for full functionality.
If any errors are found, then you can simply switch back to the old version until you have resolved the issue.
WordPress recommends PHP7 and websites can be tested using the PHP Compatibility Checker plugin. Any old plugins or themes that are not compatible are worth replacing as older, unsupported plugins pose a security risk.
Non-WordPress sites can be checked for compatibility using open-source PHP Compatibility (requires some technical knowledge).
While it is possible to remain on PHP 5.6 for now, this version will become obsolete in future and an upgrade will be required.
Refer to our Help Centre for step-by-step instructions: How to Upgrade to PHP 7
