Short online courses with certificates : End of life cycle for php 5.6 & 7.1. Short online courses with certificates On December 3, 2022 , PHP 7.0 reaches the end of its life . This means that there will be no more php security support in the event of a security vulnerability. The same will happen with version 5.6 whose support expires on December 31, 2022 . This officially marks the end of an era for PHP 5, as its first release began 14 years ago.
According to the official WordPress statistics page (based on php), over 63% of WordPress sites still use version 5.6 or lower. Including WordPress sites running PHP 7.0, 82.8% of all wordpress sites use php which will not be supported from January 2019 .
Even more important are statistics outside the WordPress community. According to W3Techs , PHP 5 is currently used by 76.9% of all websites that use PHP .
This is not only negative in terms of security, but also because there are still a large number of WordPress sites that do not benefit from the additional performance improvements of PHP 7.2.
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Why you should use the latest version of php
Below we will see the reasons why you should upgrade the PHP of your site to the latest version.
Security
The first and most important reason is to ensure that security issues that may arise are resolved . Php 5.4 for example has not been updated since 2015, while version 5.5 has not been fixed (via a patch file) since 2016.
It is worth noting: According to CVE data , 2016 was the year with the most security issues for php, more than 100 were recorded. These include DoS, code execution, code overflow, etc.
Performance
According to the Phoronix benchmarks , PHP 7.2 runs 13% faster than 7.1 and 20% faster than 7.0. It is 250% faster than PHP 5.6 , which has not yet been updated by 40% of WordPress users. Official PHP statistics show that PHP 7 is twice as fast as version 5.6 and even with half the latency.
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Support is another reason why you should use the latest and most supported versions of PHP. As we saw above, the active support of PHP 7. has expired on December 3, 2017. While the security support will expire at the end of ’18 . Regarding version 7.1, its active support will expire on December 1, 2022 . So the best option is to upgrade to 7.2 to ensure that the latest security updates are constantly supported by the PHP community.
The most important of PHP 7.2
In addition to performance improvements, version 7.2 includes some major PHP security updates. Specifically:
Libsodium is part of the kernel
In previous versions the libsodium encryption library was available through PECL “PHP Extension Community Library”, now it is part of the kernel . This add-on makes php 7.2 the first programming language to add a modern encryption method to its regular library.
Argon 2 for encrypting passwords
Argon 2 is the award -winning encryption algorithm created to replace the Bcrypt algorithm and further improve php security . It is designed to achieve a higher rate of memory filling and efficient use of multiple computing units, while providing defense against attacks.
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As we saw above, PHP 7.2 runs 13% faster than 7.1 and 20% faster than 7.0. It is 250% faster than PHP 5.6, which has not yet been updated by 40% of WordPress users.
Subtractions
As with any update, in version 7.2 there are several commands and functions of previous versions that have been removed and display errors in the log files when used by developers. You can see the full list here .
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All DNHOST servers support PHP 7.2 and you can easily activate it by following the procedure through the DNHOST Plesk. Our hosting
packages open by default in PHP 5.4. This is done for convenience so that all sites are immediately compatible. Of course, following the above very easy procedure , you upgrade to PHP 7.2 .
Caution! Most major platforms running the latest version (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.) are compatible with PHP 7.2. However, there is a possibility that some themes and plugins or even the core of your website may not be compatible with PHP 7.2, so confirm it before installing 7.2. There are also plugins that can check the compatibility of PHP 7.2 on your site. For example PHP Compatibility Checker for wordpress.
Enable PHP 7.2 to increase the security and performance of your site! For any help do not hesitate to contact our technical support or write us your question in the comments.