WP Engine Announces PHP 7 Availability For All Customers

Promise Of Incredible Speed And Performance Benefits To 60,000 Customers Worldwide

AUSTIN, Texas — March 6, 2017 — WP Engine, the world’s leading WordPress digital experience platform, today announced it is making the PHP 7 environment available and an easy upgrade process for all existing and new customers. WP Engine conducted extensive testing to ensure that all of the company’s 60,000 customers have a path to adopt PHP 7, which offers dramatically improved website performance and a better overall experience for visitors to a site. This is part of the company’s promise to ensure its platform is enterprise grade and works at scale.

PHP, an open source server-side web development language, powers approximately 84 percent of the internet. The most significant update since 2004, PHP 7 delivers significant speed and drastically reduced memory consumption. Specifically, leading benchmarks show WordPress sites can perform as much as two to three times faster versus prior versions. Additionally, PHP 7 can serve up to three times as many requests per second and handle more traffic with the same number of resources. With these performance benefits, PHP 7 can mean better SEO, conversion and customer retention on your site — all without adding any additional hardware or IT resources.

“As of February 2017, only 6.2 percent of the WordPress community have upgraded to PHP 7,” said Jason Cohen, CTO of WP Engine. “We’ve made it easy to test site readiness for PHP 7 with our compatibility checker plugin, so now it’s incredibly easy for anyone on our platform to upgrade to PHP 7. We are delivering on our performance promise for faster WordPress applications that improve customers’ digital experiences, whether small business, big brand or agency.”

WP Engine has made numerous performance enhancements to its platform over the past year — especially to help customers prepare for greater performance. Notably, in July, the company announced the web’s first PHP Compatibility Checker plugin which was made freely available in order to test code conformance and evaluate site readiness for PHP 7 and bring the promise of serious performance gains to the WordPress community.

From WP Engine’s platform standpoint, in May 2016, the company launched Page Performance, becoming the first managed WordPress platform with a web page speed performance tool integrated into the user dashboard. On average customers have seen a 16 percent improvement in the speed of their websites as a result of taking action on the performance recommendations generated by the tool.

In July 2016, WP Engine announced support for HTTP/2, the latest version of HTTP, which reduces web page latency, optimizes experiences for mobile users and improves SEO. HTTP/2 results in a typical website seeing a 30 percent performance gain.

This fall, WP Engine integrated support of Let’s Encrypt into its platform giving customers unlimited free SSL certificates for HTTPS — an important enhancement since most of the major browsers require encryption for HTTP/2 making it de facto mandatory. And with today’s announcement of the availability of PHP 7 and the potential of two to three times site speed improvements, WP Engine is further delivering on its commitment to offer the best performing and most secure WordPress digital experience on the web today.

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