PHP 7.2 RC Available on All SiteGround Servers

We are quite excited to see PHP 7.2 coming. It is expected to bring some considerable speed, security and efficiency improvement. As always, you can count on SiteGround to provide you with the hottest technologies as they come. The latest release candidate of PHP 7.2 has just been made available on our servers. To learn how to test it safely read below.

Being still in a release candidate state, PHP 7.2 already has all the planned new features developed but is not completely bug-free. Additionally, it introduces a lot of changes from the previous PHP versions (see the changelog of this RC version). That is why we strongly recommend that you do not use it on a production environment, as it may simply break your site. The best way to play around with it safely is to:

1. Create a staging copy of your live site
2. Use the PHP version manager in your cPanel to apply PHP 7.2 RC to the staging copy only.

Thus, you will easily see if there are issues in the code of your site, that could prevent your future move to the new and better PHP.

During our internal tests all freshly installed WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal behaved well on PHP 7.2. However, when additional plugins, themes, and extensions came into play, we saw more errors because of PHP functions or syntax, that were already deprecated in 7.2 version. We are positive that all popular and well-supported themes and plugins will soon update their codebase to align it with PHP 7.2.  So, go ahead and get ready to take advantage of all the benefits of the new version once it is officially released.