PHP 7.4 – End of Life – 28th November 2022

PHP, the Hypertext Preprocessor used by servers to communicate with WordPress has announced the end of life (EOL) for version 7.4.

What does this mean?

From a data protection perspective, it means that there will be no more security updates available, so it’s time, if you haven’t already, to plan to upgrade as part of the technical and organisational measures to protect personal data.

WordPress powers 40% of all websites worldwide, which makes moving to the latest branch of PHP, version 8, of paramount importance for all WordPress website owners. Staying on PHP 7.4 past EOL introduces major security risks and can result in further increase in global malware volumes.

The latest version of WordPress 6.1,  is fully compatible with PHP 8.1, BUT you will need to ensure that all your themes, plugins and custom development have been adapted to use the new features and coding of PHP 8, so please use a staging version of your website to test thoroughly before updating production.

Failure to update these under the bonnet changes could be a security risk and given the software is free it could be deemed a failure/breach should the regulator get involved.

The tech team at iThemes security have produced a wonderful, easy to follow guide on how to update your server(s) from PHP 7.4 to PHP 8, you can find it here