It’s time to say goodbye to PHP 7.4 and welcome to PHP 8! Some time ago, HITS upgraded all clients to PHP 7.4, and we immediately noticed an improvement in the speed of their sites. In addition, PHP 7.4 introduced some significant performance gains for all web applications, including WordPress. However, technology never stands still, and a newer version of PHP 8 has since launched.
A Brief Introduction To PHP
PHP is a widely-used, open-source, and general-purpose scripting language that is exceptionally well suited for web development. PHP can be easily embedded into HTML, meaning that it is both accessible and flexible. This scripting language was first developed in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf. He created the language entirely for personal use, hence the original name: “Personal Home Page Tools”. Despite its humble beginnings, PHP is now one of the most commonly used server-side programming languages globally. That’s because PHP is considered simple enough for beginners to understand, yet it offers advanced features that more experienced developers can take advantage of it. Regardless of your level of expertise, having a basic understanding of PHP is handy if you’re in the business of running or building websites. PHP is compatible with all major Operating Systems (OS’s) and can be used with popular database tools like MySQL. In addition, it’s often used to create dynamic content, such as PDFs, images, and videos. What’s more, it’s always being updated to provide new features and improve performance.
What Is New In PHP 8?
PHP 8.0 is a major update of the PHP language. It contains many new features and optimizations, including named arguments, union types, attributes, constructor property promotion, match expression, null safe operator, JIT, improvements in the type system, error handling, and consistency.
PHP 8 Is Now Default For All HITS Client Sites
Now that PHP 7.4 is no longer actively supported by the PHP team, HITS has switched the PHP version for all our servers and websites to PHP 8. PHP 8 has been made sufficiently stable with our servers, platform, and framework powering our client sites thanks to our extensive testing. The switchover was instant, and we have since tested each of our client sites to ensure that they are all playing nice.
When PHP 7.0 was released, it claimed to be twice as fast as PHP 5.6. Now, PHP 8 is 64% faster than PHP 7.0 – meaning that it smashes the previous benchmark out of the water.
PHP 8 Is The Recommended Version In WordPress
Since the last update to WordPress, PHP 8 has been set as the recommended version for all WordPress instances. While legacy is still in place for versions under this, they will soon be removed in future builds of WordPress.
We hope you like the new performance results of PHP 8 as much as we do!
Not A HITS Client?
If you’re not already a HITS client, and you’d like to learn more about how we can help you with our best-practice website solutions using WordPress and the latest PHP 8, call us now.
