Upgrading to PHP 7 should be at the top of your to-do list

When you upgrade your application to any version in the 7.x series, you’ll probably notice major speed improvements. With PHP 7.4, which is the latest version as of this writing, your application might run up to three times as fast. That makes a huge difference in the number of servers required to run your application, saving you lots of money in the long run.

If the speed improvements weren’t enough, you will be very impressed with the reduced memory usage per request. PHP 7 requires between one half and one eighth the memory per request as an application running on PHP 5, according to a company with a large existing PHP 5 application. They calculated that it saved them over a million dollars in the first year.

PHP is somewhat famous for being easy to mess up. It gives you a lot of power; if programmers are not careful, they can create bugs that are difficult and costly to debug and potentially cause major security problems. PHP 7 makes it much harder to screw up, by including strict type hinting and removing old, dangerous functions. Once you’ve upgraded, programmers can sprinkle these type hints throughout the codebase and catch bugs they never knew existed.

Caching makes frequently-used pages load faster. In PHP 7, the caching facilities are even better than they were in PHP 5.5. You can configure PHP’s caching to tailor its behavior to your specific site.

Previously, many kinds of errors were fatal, meaning that they stopped execution of the PHP program and caused the visitor to see a 500 page. Now, many of these errors are more easily detected and can be recovered from. This way, you can display custom error messages in more situations and recover gracefully from a variety of problems.

PHP 7 switched the default number size on all platforms to 64 bits. This means that you can deal with larger numbers without strange bugs caused by integer overflow on some platforms. The precision of calculations involving very large or very small numbers is also much better.

Although there is still a wealth of information online about PHP 5, it is no longer in active support. In the future, it will be harder to keep PHP 5 applications running, since security patches and bug fixes have been stopped for multiple years now.

In many cases, it’s more practical to run PHP applications on a hosting provider’s infrastructure instead of your own. As PHP 5 gets longer in the tooth, fewer and fewer hosting providers continue to offer it as an option.

Switching to PHP 7 is extremely important. It can result in huge cost savings, both in hosting costs and in developer time. If you don’t upgrade your application to PHP 7 very soon, your hosting provider might not be able to continue hosting your application. Plus, the lack of security fixes for PHP 5 means that you are much more vulnerable to hackers. Over time, all of these issues will get even worse as PHP 5 gets older and older.

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