Is your WordPress site ready for PHP 7 ?
Why do we need to update to PHP 7 ? if you do care about SEO performance then it’s time to update to PHP 7 due to its high performance
High Performance
PHP 7 has demonstrated higher data processing and load-taking capabilities than its predecessors. A number of tests were conducted as part of a comparison between PHP 7 and HHVM, which is considered the rival of PHP 7 on different content management systems.
Good for online business
PHP 7 is especially good for businesses that have a large online presence, such as ecommerce giants. PHP 7 is at par with HHVM when it comes to providing great performance, resilience and optimal utilization and enjoys a slight edge when it comes to WordPress setups.
Lesser memory usage
PHP 7 has demonstrated that technology infrastructure can process higher computing requests without consuming proportionately higher memory. The image below shows a test that was conducted on an Ubuntu Utopic package 5.5.12, PHP 7 consumed 30.879 MB of memory while PHP 5.6 consumed 134.844 MB during peak memory usage. The image also provides other important parameters.
Good for business
From the perspective of business, PHP 7 offers clear advantages over its predecessors as demonstrated by the case study of Etsy, the peer-to-peer e-commerce giant. Etsy’s technology infrastructure had been struggling to handle millions of visits to the website daily. Etsy needed to make sure that its new internal API handles more computing requests without consuming too much power and allows Etsy to reduce their operational expenses. After Etsy adopted HHVM to run its PHP applications, the performance improved significantly.
There are a number of tools and checklists out there to verify if your site is ready for PHP 7. One of those tools is the plugin provided by WP Engine. The plugin will check whether the code of all your active plugins and themes is compatible with PHP 7.
if you want to check whether your WordPress site is compitable or not for PHP 7, you can install this plugin and check your current installed themes and plugins
here’s the link : https://wordpress.org/plugins/php-compatibility-checker/
according to YOAST plguin, There are a few caveats that we need to keep in mind:
1. Even though the plugin is written to detect as many problems as accurately as possible, it’s not 100% reliable in detecting errors and warnings.
2. There may be false positives detected, the plugin doesn’t check whether the code is wrapped in a PHP version check.
3. The plugin does not execute your theme or plugin code, so it cannot detect runtime compatibility issues.
Still, it’s a great and easy way to test your site’s compatibility with PHP 7. The plugin is called PHP compatibility check by WP Engine. We recommend you test PHP 7 extensively on a staging site before updating your live site to PHP 7. If you want your host to help, but don’t know how to phrase it, you can read our example mail to request your host updating your PHP version.
Summary
There is no doubt that PHP 7 represents huge improvements over its predecessors. However, it is no easy task to switch from the existing system to PHP 7. Large environments such as those of Etsy and Wikimedia Foundation took over 6 months to switch and start working smoothly. So, you should expect issues for a while until things calm down.
Resources : YOAST, SiteGround, Eduonix