Why upgrade PHP: a guide without complicated explanations

What happens if no one updates PHP: lack of security

Mostly, it’s a security and data leak that happens on outdated websites, and a hacker doesn’t have to be a CIA computer security consultant like Edward Snowden.

Here are two cases from our practice.

A WordPress content website was hacked because of PHP vulnerabilities: and attackers managed to insert the malicious code on pages

A high-load Drupal website that stores many users' data (their personal information, the records of their actions and purchases) runs on PHP 5.6 - this is partly caused by business logic restrictions and budgeting. Soon the hosting will stop the support of this version and part of the functionality will be broken, so for some time, there can be troubles with getting new leads and clients, and receiving payments on the website. So when this happens, we will have to upgrade in a very tight timeline which doesn’t leave us room for testing changes.

You see, the further you put off the PHP upgrade, the more it will cost: at some point in time, incompatibility between your website and hosting requirements, security requirements, etc. will become dramatic and expensive to fix.

Updating PHP is suggested to be as important for website security as a strong password, secure connection, and trustworthy hosting provider.

Upgrade PHP and get better performance for your website

We’re working with Drupal a lot, so let us provide some examples based on this CMS. 

We have already written the article about performance improvement, and the relevant PHP version was one of the required conditions.

Read Drupal 7 Performance Tips.

In a nutshell, such CMSs as Drupal and WordPress want users to use particular PHP versions for the websites built on those CMSs. Drupal has 3 supported major versions right now: Drupal 7, 8, 9, and the recommendation is to run those websites on PHP 7.3 or higher. It’s worth mentioning that PHP 7.3 is not the newest version, so website owners have a so-called release window and time to upgrade.

What happens if a website runs on an older version? First of all, its overall performance is noticeably lower than it could be if it was running on a newer version.