PHP 7.3 Upgrade on Managed WordPress

For our Managed WordPress customers, official security updates for PHP 7.2 will end on November 30, 2020. If your site is currently running PHP 7.2, it will be automatically upgraded to PHP 7.3 on November 1, 2020. You can verify what PHP version your site is using in your control panel.

If your site has custom PHP code, including custom themes or plugins, you may need to modify your code to keep them compatible with the version upgrade. If you want to test this PHP update on any sites in your account, you can order a clone site to test the update and ensure everything is working well.

Our upstream provider Pressable has some more information about the automatic upgrade.

PHP 7.4 available on Cloud Sites

We are excited to announce the introduction of PHP version 7.4 on Cloud Sites. Starting Monday, July 20th you’ll be able to upgrade to 7.4.

We know that staying abreast of the latest technologies is key to your continued success. You want and need the efficiencies and security these new frameworks can provide.

Active support of PHP 7.1 frameworks ended recently and security updates ended in January 2020.

It is recommended to upgrade to any of the supported frameworks (7.3 or 7.4) at your earliest convenience.

Making changes to your site code can be daunting. Although we do not provide development assistance, we will help guide you on your journey off of these older and unsupported PHP versions. We have created a Knowledge Base article to help your transition between legacy PHP versions and version 7.4.

Once PHP 7.4 is available you can update your website(s) PHP version at any time via the ‘Change Technology’ option in the Cloud Sites control panel.

Cloud Sites Debian Upgrade

Liquid Web will be performing Operating System upgrades on the Cloud Sites PHP systems, moving from Debian 8 (Jesse) to Debian 10 (Buster). These upgrades will take place between Sept 9th and Sept 12th, starting at 9 PM to 11 PM CT each night. You may experience session loss during the maintenance period but we do not anticipate any website downtime. These upgrades only impact the Debian version. Rest assured, your site(s) PHP version is not changing.

What does this mean for you?

If one of your sites relies on a legacy library, you may want to work with your development team to see if there are code changes that need to be made or additional features to be leveraged. It is likely that these library upgrades just add features and flags more so than an entire change in format or structure.

To help you understand the impact of the changes, we have included a list of the most common libraries being used today and what is changing in those libraries. In the list below, items preceded with a (-) are being removed or upgraded. Items preceded with (+) indicate the new version or addition.

In this example, we are upgrading the library for wget from 1.16-1+deb8u5 to 1.20.1-1.1.

-wget 1.16-1+deb8u5
+wget 1.20.1-1.1

For additional insight, you can find information on the various libraries at Debian’s Package Portal and their tracker.

The schedule for the dates of the specific PHP systems maintenances will be posted at least 1 week prior on the Liquid Web status page.

See the full list of updates below.