What is PHP?
It is an open source language for creating and managing websites. It was developed in 1996 by Tim Berners-Lee. It is the dominant language for developing websites today and has over 90% market share. PHP is mainly used for database driven websites. However, you can develop anything from blogs to e-commerce websites with PHP. The major advantages of upgrading your WordPress site to PHP 8 introduces many new features to increase security. It has many new security issues addressed that could prevent a hacker from accessing your site. In addition, PHP 8 reduces the errors which could be faced during development of your website. PHP 8 has improved the coding speed of PHP from 1,000 to 1,000,000. It reduces the space required on the disk and improving the speed of your website.
PHP 8 is faster
There is no denying that there are many speed improvements introduced by PHP 8 that will help your website to run faster. However, there are many more little tweaks that can also bring your website faster. PHP 8 comes with some small changes like the new classes and added functions. For example, with the new classes in the latest version of PHP, your website can better handle new JavaScript libraries like Prototype.js. PHP 8 allows a lot of functions to be split into functions and methods. This will cut down on the repetitive coding that’s happening in most websites. PHP 8 offers more optimisations Optimisation is one of the most common things that developers look forward to with every new version of WordPress. PHP 8 is filled with more optimisations for WordPress.
PHP 8 is more secure
While securing the website is a must, the upgrade will improve the security of your website as well. In addition, better security comes with better performance. New Database PHP variant In a separate blog post, I talked about some of the issues with the MySQL variant in recent years. Most of these issues were due to the long-term lack of security patches for the MySQL variants. With PHP 8, it is clear to see that PHP 6 is no longer supported and therefore will never receive a security patch. Also, it is likely that in the future, PHP 7 and MySQL 5.7 will no longer be compatible as well. Performance Let’s face it, if you write a blog, then your users are there to see your posts and ads
Conclusion
Overall the upgrade is well worth it in terms of performance and security. If your already a WordPress Web Host customer PHP 8 is installed by default and no further action is needed. For those of using using 3rd party web host take a backup of your website before upgrading, we recommend using the plugin All-In-One-Migration and then upgrade to PHP 8. If your website breaks or has issues you may be missing PHP packages, in this case contact your web host or downgrade to the version you were on before.
