WordPress ended support for PHP 5

WordPress officially ended support for PHP version 5 on August 8.

The minimum supported version of WordPress is PHP 5.6.20 from 2019, but it will be updated to 7.0.0 in the future. The recommended version of PHP will remain unchanged at 7.4+.

There is no specific percentage of usage below which a PHP version must fall before support in WordPress is discontinued, but historically it has been the case that project maintainers have used 5% as a baseline. Now that the use of PHP 5.6 is well below this level at 3.9% and drops by about 0.1% every few weeks, so when developing a site, you need to  To take this into account, in order to choose a hosting for the site, the plans themselves to increase the minimum supported version of PHP can move forward.

Support for WordPress PHP 8.0, 8.1 and 8.2 is "very good" and participants may soon decide on a proposal for criteria that will allow them to remove the "beta" support label in new versions of PHP. Almost 26% of WP users are already using PHP 8.0+.

The decision to increase the minimum supported version was made after a lengthy seven-month discussion, which, surprisingly, did not cause much resistance. While WordPress sites that remain on PHP 5.6 cannot be upgraded after WordPress 6.2, they will still receive security updates as the project is currently rolling them back to version 4.1+. Upgrading to 7.0.0 for the minimum supported version will have many benefits for WP theme ecosystem and plugins, will significantly reduce memory usage for updated websites and provide better security and improvements to basic tools.

Prior to this minimum required update, some hosts even took matters into their own hands, encouraging users to upgrade to newer versions of PHP. Dreamhost charges extra for sites that require extended support for PHP 7.4 and earlier. IONOS and Strato have a similar policy.