PHP Upgrade Tips

PHP is clearly the predominant web site backend, and is used for more than 70% of the world's web sites.

The current version as of February 2025 is 8.4. Keeping your site up to date ensures that you have the latest security and performance enhancements. However, there are still plenty of sites still running on unsupported versions of PHP such as 5.x or 7.x.

Eventually you will not be able to use this old code, as one of our clients unforuntately discovered when they changed their hosting service.

Below are some tips dealing with PHP upgrades.

• Use a free tool such as "rectorphp". This is a bit complicated to use, but it's good at refactoring code to use modern syntax and styling.
• Very old interactive PHP code that uses forms for data input is likely to use a now obsolete feature called "register_globals", and will not work at all when you upgrade to PHP from version 5.4 and beyond. The code can be fixed rather easily, but this is tedious and time-consuming. We developed a tool to identify pages where there are potential problems, so the required upgrading can proceed smoothly and with confidence.
• Another major issue with old sites is that may be using obsolete database libraries. While rectorphp can help to upgrade the old database code, it doesn't help when the original code is difficient in error handling. Here, too, we've developed a tool to address this issue.
• While upgrading the PHP code, you might want to consider modernizing the design. We see lots of web pages that use unnecessary, deprecated, or even obsolete html and inline styling. You don't need to upgrade these all at once, but doing so will result in faster, "responive" (i.e. mobile-friendly) web pages.

Got a site that needs updating? Contact Us and let's discuss how we can help.