WordPress 7.0 will drop support for PHP 7.2 and 7.3. The team has confirmed it, which puts this near the top of the WordPress core updates worth reading properly instead of skimming. It reads like a version bump, but if you maintain legacy infrastructure for clients it is a deadline.
What these WordPress core updates mean for legacy sites
WordPress 7.0 is scheduled for April 2026, and dropping 7.2 and 7.3 raises the minimum supported PHP version to 7.4.0. I remember how the PHP 5.2 cutoff went: half the web felt like it was held together with duct tape and stale transients. If you still have clients on 7.2 or 7.3, that upgrade just moved up the list.
Security is the usual argument for staying current, but the performance gap matters just as much. Newer PHP engines handle memory allocation and race conditions better than the 7.2 branch ever managed. I went further into the version churn in my post on handling WordPress core update regressions and planning for 7.0.
Maintenance releases and who decides
Before 7.0 there is 6.9.1, planned for February 3, 2026. It is a stability release with no new features, and it is still worth putting through staging before it reaches client sites. The full release schedule announcement is on the Make blog.
Nominations for the 2026 Core Team Representatives are also open. Those are the people who set the direction of the WordPress core updates the rest of us then have to plan around. If you have ever complained about a deprecated hook or a filter behaving differently than the docs suggest, this is the part of the process where the complaint counts. I wrote up the details in my post on nominations for 2026 core reps.
A quick compatibility check
You do not have to wait for a broken site to find out where you stand. A helper function or a WP-CLI call is enough to audit a fleet. The snippet below drops into a utility plugin and warns any admin whose server sits below the version 7.0 will require.
<?php
/**
* Simple check for WordPress 7.0 PHP compatibility.
*/
function bbioon_check_php_compatibility() {
$min_php = '7.4.0';
if ( version_compare( PHP_VERSION, $min_php, '<' ) ) {
if ( is_admin() && current_user_can( 'manage_options' ) ) {
add_action( 'admin_notices', function() use ( $min_php ) {
echo '<div class="notice notice-error"><p>';
printf(
esc_html__( 'Critical: Your PHP version (%s) is below the upcoming WordPress 7.0 requirement (%s). Update soon.', 'bbioon' ),
PHP_VERSION,
$min_php
);
echo '</p></div>';
});
}
}
}
add_action( 'init', 'bbioon_check_php_compatibility' );If chasing core release notes is eating your dev hours, I can take it on. I have been working with WordPress since the 4.x days.
What to do before April
The specifics of the PHP support drop get worked out in the Dev Chat on January 21, 2026 at 15:00 UTC in Slack, so read the log if you cannot make it. The rest is unglamorous work: list the sites still on 7.2 or 7.3, get their hosts onto 7.4 or newer, then confirm the plugins on them still load. It is a much smaller job in January than it will be in April.
