Upgrading to PHP 7 with WP Engine WordPress Hosting

It’s official, WP Engine has been supporting PHP 7 since July 2016, is your site ready for the upgrade?

Like everything else at WP Engine, they have made this really simple for you to check your site before upgrading to PHP 7.

With two very simple steps you can verify your site is ready for PHP 7 and have your WP Engine account upgraded, and it’s free.

Step 1 – Check Your Sites Compatibility

Like I said, they made this supper simple by developing a WordPress Plugin, PHP Compatibility Checker.

Once you’ve installed the plugin and activated it, you’ll find the PHP Compatibility under the Tools section in the WP Admin.

After Clicking on the PHP Compatibility option, you’ll have two options, as depicted below.

1. Which PHP version are you scanning for (make sure PHP 7 is selected)
2. Do you want to scan all plugins and themes or just active (I select all, but if you have a bunch of themes and plugins, just do active)
3. Then simple click “Scan Site”

Once the scan is complete, you will see a list of all your plugins and themes and the details regarding their compatibility.

I want to point out, if you have any results as shown above that list, Compatible and Warning, you may want to check with a developer before upgrading. If they are premium themes or plugins you can always use the developer support forms to find out.

Very Important: Before moving onto step 2, backup your website!

I’m sure that WP Engine support will do this before they flip the switch, but you should always take ownership of your site management, which includes backups.

Step 2 – Contact Support to Initiate PHP 7

WP Engine has some of the best support I’ve ever had the privilege of contacting. That said, it will be really simple to contact them through Live Chat and request the upgrade.

Just login to your WP Engine Portal (my.wpengine.com) and Click Live Chat, once an agent joins the chat, just let them know you want to upgrade to PHP 7. They will create a ticket and you’ll get an email when it’s done!

Why should you upgrade to PHP 7?

By upgrading to PHP 7, you’ll enable WP Engine to provide an improved hosting experience for your WordPress Website. A few of the things you can expect…

• Site speed – PHP 7 can handle uncached hits 2-3x faster than on PHP 5.5
• Resource efficiency – An upgrade to PHP 7 is estimated to bring 30-50% improvements in memory consumption
• Service more concurrent users – PHP 7 can serve up to 3x as many requests per second and handle more traffic with the same number of resources
• Null coalescing operator – Create shortcuts for common use cases by consolidating comparisons and checks into a single operator
• Error Handling – Many fatal errors have been replaced with object-oriented exceptions to make it easier to find and address bugs
• Long-Term Support – Lower technical debt with ongoing support of bug fixes, security patches, and maintenance updates for years to come 

Wish you had a developer to help you with these kind of things?

Subscribe to my WordPress Website Support service and you’ll have always have a developer on call!