Over the last few months, we have been busy discussing issues and remediating our customer’s incompatible websites to ensure compatibility with the latest release of the PHP programming language that WordPress websites run on (PHP8).
November 28, 2022: PHP 7.4 is now End of Life (EOL)
As of midnight tonight, PHP7.4 is no longer supported by its developers. This means there will be no further updates to the software, including security updates.
If your website is currently incompatible with PHP8 (the currently supported version), it is at increased risk of hacking through unpatched security vulnerabilities in the future.
What are we doing for our customers with incompatible websites?
While we recommend upgrading, we understand that this may not be economically viable for some of our customers at this time.
A website on PHP7.4 will continue to function tomorrow as it did yesterday and there are no immediate actions required, but we have written to those business owners to ensure there are fully informed.
From a service delivery perspective, we will still be providing the management and maintenance services that form part of their Care Plan, but we will obviously be unable to update software requiring PHP8 to function, which could impact website operation or render it unusable in the future.
As all our staging systems and automated tools have been upgraded to operate on PHP8, we need to clone and test updates for these sites manually; this means that for the next few months, we will not be able to perform updates and testing as frequently as usual. PHP 7.4 sites only make up 6% of our websites under management, so we estimate a maintenance cycle of a few weeks.
This limitation will be in place until the New Year when we should have an automated cloning and test facility for legacy PHP sites available.
Do you have a site you know (or suspect) might be out of date and at risk? if so, drop us a message, and we will take a look for you.
