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WordPress and PHP problems - matthewgrace - 11-03-2020
8 out of 10 WordPress sites running on a PHP version are no longer supported if the site owner is not acting fast.
According to WordPress.org statistics, 26.5% of WordPress websites are using PHP 5.6. What is the problem? PHP 5.6 reached end of development on January 19, 2017, and it will officially stop updating on December 31st. This means it no longer has security support, and websites that continue to use it could be exposed to unpatched vulnerabilities.
Next, PHP 7.0, which ended on December 3, 2018. It is also no longer a supported version of PHP. However, 15.2% of WordPress sites are on PHP 7.0.
If you're thinking, isn't this the newly released PHP 7.0 ?! This is the version two years ago and 11 months ago. As with any software, PHP has a release lifecycle that it needs to stick with to keep evolving with new improvements and features (just like WordPress). Every major version of PHP is fully supported with security patches and fixes for two years after its release.
And currently, about 10% of other websites are running on unsupported old PHP versions, including 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, and 5.5.
So out of total, at the time of writing, up to 70% of WordPress sites are either running or about to run, a PHP version is not supported.
Only about 30% of WordPress websites are running on the latest supported versions PHP 7.2 and PHP 7.3.