Despite the fact that the biggest website building tool in the world, WordPress, has an auto-update feature, there are many developers and website owners that like to turn it off. There is some sort of negativity around a quick response to version updates almost questioning its effectiveness. Not all updates merely occupy more space in your hardware and slow your websites down. There are some genuine updates that require to be installed are perhaps the only way to improve website performance. 

Unfortunately due to the rising number of attempts of hacking on websites all around the world, much of the focus for newer version updates for frameworks and programming languages has been on security. A huge chunk of effort is also dedicated towards solving the problems and issues in the previous versions. Despite all this, there are genuine efforts to make innovations and improve the overall performance of your PHP websites.

Brief on PHP

PHP is a server side programming language that powers almost three fourth of the total websites worldwide today. The popularity of PHP is down to two major reasons. First reason is that it is open source. This way any independent developer can use the language without having to pay licensing fees. Any other group of developers can also build a framework or a website building tool keeping PHP as the default programming language.

That precisely is the second reason behind PHP’s popularity. Some terrific website building tools like WordPress, Elementor, etc and frameworks like Laravel, CodeIgniter etc have offered great intuitive solutions to the otherwise complex process of website making. 

Current Scenario on PHP Versions

As of now, PHP 7.4 or greater is required to run the latest version of WordPress 6.0 Arturo and onwards. Any older version may not work as smoothly as the latest ones would. The website building tools and programming languages work in tandem to make performance improvements.

Similarly latest versions of frameworks like Laravel 9 require PHP version 8.0. 

Why Should You Update PHP on Your Website?

Unless you have a space crunch or you have an overwhelmed server resource, there shouldn’t really be a reason why you wouldn’t want to update the technologies that power your websites. All it takes is a few clicks. 

Apart from updating the platform and the programming language, your website should also have updated dependencies, plugins, themes and APIs. The performance of a website depends on all of the aforementioned things. 

Here are some good reasons why you should be updating the PHP versions of your website.

  • Innovation

As iterated earlier, the version updates are not just limited to the standard practices of making your websites more secure and faster. There are many new functionalities that evolve from the user response. Newer PHP updates enable developers to incorporate all these new features and functionalities that make the user experience better on your website. There are also innovations made in the newer updates that make the overall coding process less complex and shorten the overall length of the codes.

  • Security

Hackers are keeping up with the pace of the rise of technology and its usage. Because of that, they know a lot of common syntax, programming practices and patterns of codes. To prevent the hackers from attacking your codes and databases, PHP rolls out versions that are almost impossible for hackers to crack, unless of course they figure out vulnerabilities. So the process of updating the syntax, patterns, codes and practices is a forever ongoing one. Keeping your programming language always updated keeps you ahead of your attackers. 

  • Performance

When the length or complexity of the code is shortened, it takes less time to get executed. These faster executions of small programs make the overall performance of a website better. Newer updates require simpler coding. That results in faster program application. Altogether it leads to a better and faster user experience.

  • Troubleshooting

The pursuit of perfection is a journey that has no destination. Like everything else out there in the world of technology, no programming language is perfect. The imperfection may sometimes be in terms of incompatibility as well. There may be other technologies or supporting tools that may not work with the current version of PHP on your website. Updating the version may troubleshoot a lot of the performance and compatibility issues. 

  • Support

Every dependency, plugin, theme, API or any other third party integration these days offer tremendous support to the developers. To avail the best support, it is always recommended unanimously to keep the programming language and all its supporting elements updated. Developers are often asked to update their platforms, frameworks and programming languages to get the latest real time support.

A smoothly running website is a culmination of a lot of aspects running on parallel tracks. Backing up the website, checking for updates for the hosting services, updating third party integrations like themes, plugins and APIs and many more similar processes are pretty much industry standard. Agencies offering top php web development service would surely help you out performing these simultaneous updates. But it is important to keep a track of every update and what it offers to avoid any performance bug. 

Conclusion

Updating multiple technologies at once could prove to be a big headache. While many technologies like WordPress have enabled auto-update, you still have to manually update a lot of minor supporting technologies. This headache and complication is surely worth taking given the benefits these updates offer. As iterated earlier, you must keep every aspect of your website updated for smooth user experience unless you have a serious space or resource crunch.