PHP 5.6.x Reaches End of Life - But Don't Panic!

by Dave Reeder , 08 January 2019

PHP 5.6.x Reaches End of Life - But Don't Panic!

This month (Jan 19) PHP 5.6.x reaches the end of it's life. This means it won't receive updates anymore, (including security updates) and could have major effect on your website!

It is estimated that 80% of the web runs on PHP and a significant proportion of that still use PHP 5.X. However, PHP 5.X has been around for a while now and v7 offers better performance and includes some coding advantages and features.

Not sure if this affects you? Here is what you need to do...

Check with your Hosting Company

The first thing to do is ask your hosting company if they are going to carry on running PHP 5.6. If so, do they have a date in mind to stop running it?

Yesterday I checked with two large UK based hosting companies and they confirmed they will continue to run PHP v5.6 for now.

Most of my client sites are on Concrete5 v5.7 and v8 so they have been running on PHP v7 for a while now anyway, but I needed to make sure that users on older versions are ok for now.

What if your Hosting Company is forcing you use PHP 7?

If your hosting company says you'll need to run on v7 and up, your'll need to check if your websites' platform (Wordpress, Concrete5, Drupal etc) supports that version "out of the box" or if it needs work to make it run on that version.

If you are not sure about your Concrete5 or Wordpress site, get in touch with us and we can advise what to do and if there is a cost to update your site.

Help! I'm not sure what to do?!

For now, our hosting company is continuing to support PHP 5.6. So we can host Wordpress and Concrete5 websits on 5.6 until you have had a chance to update the site to run on PHP 7.

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