PHP has several versions released based on bug fixes and improvements. However, many business communities and developers lack faster adoption of newer versions. This is bad from a security perspective as well as and many WordPress sites remain devoid of performance enhancements with PHP 7 and above versions. Therefore, have a look at these crucial reasons why you should be using supported PHP versions.

• Security

Security is one of the primary reasons to update your PHP version to a new one. Lack of support and security patches in the older versions already made 2016 one of the worst years for PHP security, with over 100 issues reported. These issues included DoS, code execution, overflow, memory corruption, XSS, gain information types, and much more.

• Performance

New PHP versions like 7.1, 7.3, and so on bring over small optimizations, making noticeable performance improvements. For example, PHP 7 allows the system to execute twice as many requests per second as the older PHP 5.6, at almost half of the latency.

• Support

Support is another reason to use the latest and supported PHP version. For instance, developers of plugins and dashboard themes can only extend support back for older versions to some extent. However, things will eventually break when you run on old versions, which you can mostly find in WordPress forums.

• New Features

Each new PHP version comes packed with new features that most WordPress developers would prefer to with. For example, here are a bunch of new features you can enjoy if you simply upgrade from PHP 7 to 7.3.

• Combined comparison operator
• Null coalesce operator
• New type hinting
• Anonymous classes
• Nullable types
• Multi-catch exception handling
• Keys usable in lists
• Null coalescing assignment operator
• Typed properties 2.0
• Weak references
• HTTP/2 server push
• Preloading

And much more.