How PHP Updates By Your Web Host Impact Your WordPress Site

PHP is a recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. It is an open-source, general-purpose scripting language used on the server-side for developing sites and web applications with HTML coding. It is used by customer management systems like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. Accordingly, the next logical question might be, “what is PHP hosting?”.

Most hosting services support this coding language by default because it is affordable, popular, and reliable. The following article will explain everything you need to know about problems that arise from updates by your web host, and two ways to prevent these issues. 

PHP Versions

Since its release in 1994, PHP has had 6 versions in total. Here is a complete list. 

• PHP 1.0 and PHP 2.0 were developed organically.  
• PHP 3.0 reworked on the base. 
• PHP 4.0, PHP 4.1, PHP 4.2, PHP 4.3, and PHP 4.4 improved security and functionality. 
• PHP 5.0 included overall enhanced functionality and better support
• PHP 6 was released but lacked an efficient method of embedding Unicode support.
• PHP 7.0 came as a result of rapid developments taking place in the language, and this version had a near-perfect performance with enhancements such as in-build caching. 

The latest version at the time of writing is PHP 7.4.5 that was released on April 16th, 2020.

Problems Your Website Can Experience

As an introduction to PHP hosting, it is important to understand how updates can affect your website. When updated, some websites can experience issues, or even break. If your website was working fine until the update, you can probably attribute the problem to the coding language update. Here are the two reasons this can happen. 

Plugin & Theme Incompatibility 

If a theme or plugin is incompatible with the new update, they will clash. You can check this by deactivating plugins one by one to find out which one is causing the issue. You can also contact the developer of the plugin and request for them to update it too.

Problems Due To Host 

When a host fails to handle the updates efficiently, it can lead to many issues. For example, consider the 500 internal server error notification that pops up due to poor invoking of updates. To rectify it, you need to check if the AddHandler value specifies the correct version under the .htaccess file on your site to prevent this timeout error from happening again. Even the best WordPress hosting can create these problems, so it is best to be aware of this issue in order to prevent any damage.

What To Do 

You can contact your web host to help you resolve issues with updates because most services would already know the solutions given a large number of websites are run on WP. If it does not help, take a look at the following ways to troubleshoot your issues. 

Look Out For Updates

Most hosting service providers do not switch to the newest version of PHP soon after a release because the latest version can conflict with the old applications. In fact, hosts often wait until it is absolutely necessary to make updates. 

When they finally decide to do so, they will notify you while sending instructions so that you can update plugins and software before the host enables the new PHP version. You need to update all third-party applications such as themes, plugins, modules, and all things WP-related before the update is finally implemented. 

Keep in mind that web hosts do not handle updates in the same way. This is why different issues come up with various web hosts.

Back Up

In case updates do not work, you need to have a fallback plan. It is best to create a backup of the website when the hosting service provider notifies you about the update. You must do so after updating all the applications associated with your site. This will help you mitigate incompatibility issues due to the new version of the scripting language. 

Signing up for plugins that carry out automatic backups for your websites such as BackUpBuddy or BackWPup is another way to make sure you are covered. By saving and storing a copy of your website, you can always easily revert to the old version and not lose your website data.

Bottom Line 

The most common problems arising from PHP updates are related to how web hosts implement updates or their incompatibility with third-party applications. To protect your website from downtime, it is recommended to keep a watch out for updates in addition to carrying out regular backups. When you are looking where to find cheap hosting online, it is always best to find out about PHP update policies.