I received this email from my website designer tonight stating that my site will start experiencing problems due to the expiration of PHP 5.6 in Wordpress sites. Fees to upgrade range from $800 to $2000 for a rebuild of the entire site. Has anyone heard of this problem?
Your site uses a programming language called PHP 5.6, which will officially reach its end of life on 12/31/2018. Many browsers have stopped supporting it, and search engines are rewarding faster loading PHP versions that have been introduced in the last 18 months.
Translation: stuff on your site is going to start breaking if it hasn’t started malfunctioning already. Don’t worry, we have a plan!
Our team has put together more information as well as some upgrade options, special pricing & financing that is exclusive to xxxxx.
Please carefully consider the information in the link above and let me know if you have any questions. Due to the high volume of sites (nearly 60% of all Wordpress sites online are using this PHP version!), we need to schedule conference calls in advance as well as limit these offers to xxxxx customers ONLY.
Browsers don’t “support” PHP since it’s a server side language, and you’ll have no need to upgrade since the “end of life” simply means no further updates or support will be added to it, it’ll still function absolutely fine as long as your host supports it, which 99.9% of hosts will, since they lose nothing by continuing to enable support for it. A lot of what is in PHP 5.6 is also in the later versions, it’s rare they will break something that was previously supported, they mostly add new features and optimizations.
Sounds to me like they’re looking to make some easy money from people who aren’t savvy in web development. Since I doubt your site makes heavy use of PHP anyway, you don’t need to worry.
This is really their problem and not yours. As a web designer, I wouldn’t stress this change or pay money to “Upgrade”, as the vast majority of PHP website run on and continue to run on PHP 5.6 or earlier with no problems whatsoever.
Not to mention, there is no PHP 6. It skips straight through to 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2. 7.0 will also lose its functionality at the end of the year.
I still run everything on 5.6, and will eventually switch to 7.3 within a year or two when its proven stable.
The many, many times I have taken over websites from another developer and moved them from a 5.5 server to my 5.6 server there has been no issue with migration and or operation once moved over.
