Time’s Up for PHP 5.X

Is Your Website at Risk?

According to W3Techs, almost 80% of all websites globally run on PHP – an open source programming /server-side scripting language. The popular 5.X version of PHP, which is being sunsetted at the end of the year, is used by 77.5% of those sites.

Site owners and administrators will stop receiving security updates for PHP 5.X by the end of 2018, leaving businesses potentially more vulnerable to security attacks. See PHP’s end of life schedule.

Is your site at risk? Many of those affected aren’t aware of the issue. Most hosting environments and content management systems still use PHP 5, and it also may be used in the coding on your site.

WordPress, which is used for more than a quarter of all websites, has not changed its minimum PHP requirement to the supported version 7. Joomla also has kept its minimum requirement as PHP 5.3. Some CMS providers or hosting companies may be reluctant to change requirements fearing a deluge of support requests.

So, it’s up to website owners and system administrators to be proactive about transitioning to PHP 7. This may require you to do some investigating. You may need to update your servers, switch your hosting environment and possibly even redo the coding on your website.

Although there is some debate as to how risky it is to remain with the unsupported PHP version 5.X, we’re of the opinion that it’s better to be safe than sorry. Having customer information stolen from your site, as we’ve seen time and time again in the news, is much more damaging to your business than the inconvenience of an upgrade.

Want to know if you need an upgrade and how to protect yourself? We’ll walk you through the steps you need to take and make it easy. Let’s Talk.