What's involved in a PHP upgrade?

Though PHP 7.4 is currently handling your website, the software is becoming obsolete and will no longer receive official security updates by it's developers into 2023. There is a strong recommendation from the developers of Joomla and Wordpress platforms that websites are upgraded as soon as possible to run on PHP 8.0 and later 8.1

What does this mean?

For your website to stay secure you need to upgrade. The unpredictable nature of this switchover due to the varying elements in your individual website is a challenge. However, Artful has robust practices in place to limit the negative impact on your website.

What to do?

• Initial assessment to determine if upgrading your website to PHP 8.0/8.1 is a viable option.
• Take our findings onboard, discuss and you decide the best path for your website.

If upgrading to PHP 8.0/8.1 IS deemed possible:

• Make a copy of your website & carry out testing with the PHP update on a development platform.
• We provide recommendations based on your website's existing software (in particular third party themes, templates, plugins, extensions that we expect to be problematic.

If upgrading to PHP 8.0/8.1 IS NOT deemed possible:

• Unfortunately some third party software (i.e. plugins, templates, themes, extensions) will simply not have a compatible version for PHP 8.0 / 8.1. This as you can appreciate is outside of our control as we do not write the software

What will it cost?

• Initially the test to switchover and identify possible issues if any will take between 30 minutes - 1 hour charged at our standard hourly rate of $120 per hour.
• Artful will provide an estimate of the time we think it should take following the initial assessment. If your site can’t be easily tweaked to work with PHP 8.0 / 8.1 then we‘ll need to talk.
• The end result or time it will take to achieve a successful switchover cannot be predicted. We will not know for certain until an upgrade is fully completed on a development environment and following extensive testing whether or not your website can run successfully on the latest version of PHP.

What are my options if my website cannot run successfully on PHP 8.0/8.1?

• NEW SITE BUILD with Joomla 4 software compatible with PHP 8.0 / 8.1
• Do nothing and risk your website performance and security being compromised

If you are ready for us to begin the process up upgrading your website to PHP 8 please send an email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and we will start the process for you.  Or if you have any other questions just ask us!