Recently, many hosting companies have made individual websites upgrade their version of PHP (the language that runs WordPress).
This has caused many issues and a good deal of angst for WordPress site owners, mainly on older websites with plugins that have not been updated to be compatible with the newer version of PHP.
It’s a security safety issue.
Outdated versions of PHP and WordPress are more vulnerable to security threats, which is why it’s important to update both consistently. They also affect your site’s functionality leading to frustrating navigation for potential clients.
As the most popular content management system in the world, there are hackers trying to exploit WordPress vulnerabilities. This is not due to them being programmed incorrectly. Rather it’s due to changes made to how things were coded because of vulnerabilities that were found at a later date.
Has your website gone down recently?
Blame it on old code, incompatible plugins, hosting server upgrades. Some of the sites that we work with have elements that have been removed from the latest versions of PHP. This can lead to pages or even entire websites going down.
Some issues we’ve seen.
- We had a client’s Events Calendar break down because the company that made the plugin used PHP code that was not compatible with the new version.
- We’ve had a few sites that we monitor that had code written about 8 years ago. Fortunately, they only needed minor adjustments for the code to run properly.
But someone has to make those adjustments, minor or not. Are you doing that?
Worse case scenario: we had a new client call us with a completely broken site because there was PHP code that was incompatible when their hosting company upgraded their servers.
What should you do if your website goes down?
We recommend assessing your website as soon as possible if you are not currently being monitored by us.
If your website is dated or was developed over 5 years ago, a site redesign or upgrade would decrease the risk of outages caused by incompatibility with new versions of PHP.
This would also make regular maintenance easier and future changes more straightforward.
Shoot us an email at info@whatagreatwebsite.net to discuss having us audit your website.
You’ve probably already got enough other business worries to keep you up at night!
Read more about keeping your website safe and secure:
Why you should have a monitoring program set up for your website.