WordPress web hosting provider, WP Engine, is now making the PHP 7 environment available while providing an easy upgrade process for all existing and new customers. WP Engine conducted extensive testing to ensure that all of the company’s 60,000 customers have a path to adopt PHP 7, which would offer dramatically improved website performance and a better overall experience for visitors to a WordPress website.
PHP, an open source server-side web development language, powers approximately 84 percent of the Internet. The most significant update since 2004, PHP 7 would deliver significant speed and drastically reduced memory consumption. Specifically, leading benchmarks would show WordPress sites can perform as much as two to three times faster versus prior versions. Additionally, PHP 7 can serve up to three times as many requests per second and handle more traffic with the same number of resources, according to WP Engine.
With these performance benefits, PHP 7 would mean better SEO, conversion and customer retention on a website – all without adding any additional hardware or IT resources.
“As of February 2017, only 6.2 percent of the WordPress community have upgraded to PHP 7,” said Jason Cohen, CTO of WP Engine. “We’ve made it easy to test site readiness for PHP 7 with our compatibility checker plugin, so now it’s incredibly easy for anyone on our platform to upgrade to PHP 7. We are delivering on our performance promise for faster WordPress applications that improve customers’ digital experiences, whether small business, big brand or agency.”
