We’re beginning testing of PHP 7.3 on the WordPress.com platform in order to improve the stability, security, and performance of your VIP sites. From initial testing, we’re seeing a 5-10 percent reduction in page generation time, combined with a 5-10 percent reduction in CPU load.
As always, we are committed to bringing you these improvements while maintaining the stability and minimizing any potential impact to your live sites. We are scanning your code to identify potential incompatibilities, and we will let you know if we find an issue of concern with your sites.
We are aiming to resolve incompatibilities by April 23, 2019 in order to proceed with the upgrade from PHP 7.2 to 7.3.
What’s New in PHP 7.3?
New language features include a more flexible syntax for heredoc and nowdoc, improved error handling, and a new warning on continue statements that target switch structures. For more, see the full PHP 7.3 migration guide.
How Do I Prepare?
You can start preparing for the upgrade to PHP 7.3 by doing the following:
- Upgrade your local development environments to PHP 7.3.
- Add the PHPCompatibilityWP ruleset to your PHPCS implementation, and set a
testVersionof7.2-; this will flag any issues related to compatibility with 7.2 or higher. Are you making use of Git submodules? If so, we recommend scanning those as well. - Review and act on any warnings or compatibility issues raised by our team as we proactively review client sites.
Further Questions
Finally, if you have PHP 7.3-incompatible errors in your theme code, you may have already heard from us about it — or you’ll be hearing about it shortly. Please make sure your development team reviews and acts on any PHP 7.3 tickets from VIP. If you have questions, please open a ticket, and we’ll be happy to assist.
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