In March 2023, we will be increasing the minimum PHP requirement for Yoast SEO, Yoast SEO Premium, and all its add-ons to PHP 7.2. If you’re not running PHP 7.2 or higher yet, you really, really should! It will make your site faster and safer. Not to mention, your site will use less energy. That’s why I started writing about and nudging people to update to PHP 7 in our plugin six years ago (see the original post).
Background information
WordPress statistics show that about 12.1% of all WordPress installations are on PHP versions lower than 7.2. However, our own statistics – gathered through our plugins – show that only 1.86% of sites of our users (who share data with us) are on a low version of PHP. At this point, it’s simply no longer fair to give 98.14% of our customers a plugin that’s less good than what it could be.
Switching the minimum requirement to PHP 7.2 will allow us to write much better code, as the language has evolved quite a bit since PHP 5.6 was released. In addition, dropping PHP 5.6, 7.0, and 7.1 will make it a lot easier for us to get ready for PHP 9.
Help! I don’t know what to do!!
That’s fair, not everyone will know how to update their site’s PHP version. We have an article on how to update PHP that links to a lot of resources for many of the bigger hosts. This should help you get started. If your host isn’t listed, we’ll provide you with an example email.
I’m super excited to see that we’ve come to this point and I want to thank all of you who have updated your site.
Joost de Valk is an internet entrepreneur and the founder of Yoast. After selling Yoast he had stopped being active full time and acting as an advisor to the company, but came back to be its interim CTO. He is also the Head of WordPress Strategy for Yoast's parent company Newfold Digital. Joost, together with his wife Marieke, actively invests in and advises several startups through their company Emilia Capital.
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