A Finely Tuned Site: Smoothly Sailing Into PHP 7

Upon enduring user complaints regarding a slow running backend, WordPress design agency Ah So Designs knew it was time to do something about their client SongTown’s membership site.

According to Ah So Design’s President John Housholder, “We advised them that there wasn’t a lot we could do to speed up the membership portion of the site. Our code was clean. When WP Engine announced they now supported PHP 7, SongTown was excited to test the transition!”

Moving your site from PHP 5.x to PHP 7 can result in some serious improvements in site speed and memory consumption — anywhere between 25-70 percent performance improvement gains are expected. But because PHP 7 isn’t backward compatible, the transition has been a cautious one for many sites due to incompatibilities among plugins, themes, and code.

In this case study, read about how Ah So Designs was able to smoothly move SongTown’s membership site over to PHP 7 without any bumps thanks to a variety of factors.

“Before we moved to WP Engine, other services would love to handle our problems or questions by saying ‘it’s not their issue.’ WP Engine just fixes it!” — Clay Mills, Co-founder of SongTown