
PHP 7.3 is being used by 29.1% of WordPress sites. In addition to a few performance upgrades and bug fixes, 7.3 came out with the flexible heredoc and nowdoc syntax. PHP 7.3 is another widely used PHP version. The average response time for the same WordPress website is 223 ms and total success response counts are 2812. – Loader Test of PHP 7.2 on Cloudways Server PHP had actively supported this version till Nov 30th, 2019 while security supported until Nov 2020. PHP 7.2 was released on 30 November 2017 with major updates such as security patches, better codability, deprecation of old PHP functions, and improved performance.Ĭurrently, just 17.2% of WordPress sites are running on PHP version 7.2, and its performance, when compared to its predecessors, is better. The average response time for the same WordPress website is 232 ms and total success response counts are 2699. – Loader Test of PHP 7.1 on Cloudways Server

Over 4.4% of the WordPress sites use this version and had active support till December 1, 2018, and security support until December 1, 2019. It had some fixes from 7.0, and a few additional features like iterable pseudotype, symmetric array, nullable types, support for keys in list(), support for negative string offsets, and void functions. PHP version 7.1 was released after exactly one year of 7.0 on December 1, 2016. The average response time for the same WordPress website is 234 ms and total success response counts are 2682. – Loader Test of PHP 7.0 on Cloudways Server WordPress performance is satisfactory on this version. More than 5.7% of the WordPress sites use this version and many plugins and themes still actively support this version. It had its active support running until December 3, 2017, and security support until December 10, 2019.

It came out with some major improvements in speed, type declarations, error handling, and secured user-land CSPRNG (random data generation). Instead, they released a major version 7.0 on December 3, 2015. PHP 7.0Īfter 5.6, PHP did not release the 6th version. The average response time is 475 ms and the total success response counts are 1311. – Loader Test of PHP 5.6 on Cloudways Server The majority of plugin and theme developers have also stopped supporting this version which means people using it can face serious performance issues. As of today, more than 9% of the WordPress sites are still using this version.ĭespite its popularity, PHP ended active support in January 2017, but the security support was available until December 31, 2018. This version was released on August 28, 2014, and is one of the most popular versions of PHP used by many web frameworks as well as WordPress. Now let’s examine each and every PHP version separately to find out the reasons behind WordPress performance in the benchmarking tests.
#PHP 5.2 VS 5.6 PERFORMANCE HOW TO#
For instance, if a site is currently installed on PHP 5.6 or 7.0, I highly recommend upgrading it to the latest PHP version (PHP 7.4 and above).Īlso Read: How to Fix Common WordPress Errors By looking at the results, WordPress users can easily understand the importance of the updated PHP version. The result of the WordPress performance test also shows the compatibility between PHP and WordPress, and the constant improvement the former brings to your WordPress site. Second place is PHP 7.4, with 3032 success response counts and so on. I also counted the total success requests for each PHP version, where PHP 8.0 has the highest success response counts with no timeout (an obvious winner).

PHP 5.6 is the slowest one which is almost 3 times slower compared to PHP 8.0 (the latest PHP version). According to this result, PHP 8.0 is the clear winner and the fastest loading time is 164 ms. The trend shows constant improvement in site performance from PHP version 5.6 to 8.0. The graph below shows the result of the benchmarking test.
#PHP 5.2 VS 5.6 PERFORMANCE UPGRADE#
How to Upgrade PHP Version in WordPress?.
