WordPress 7.0 ships in April 2026 without support for PHP 7.2 or 7.3. Anyone following the Core development cycle saw this coming. For everyone else, the headline is that the minimum is now PHP 7.4.0. WordPress PHP support has always trailed what PHP itself calls current, because Core has to keep running on whatever hosts actually serve.
Why the minimum version bump is overdue
The project follows an informal 5% rule: a PHP version stays supported until its share of installs drops under 5%. Combined usage for 7.2 and 7.3 is now below 4%. Keeping them alive also costs real work. Every supported version is another row in the automated test matrix, and it keeps language features like arrow functions and typed properties out of Core.
I have spent 14 years cleaning up legacy environments. One client sat on a VPS running PHP 5.6 as late as 2022, and every plugin update there was a coin flip. Raising the floor for WordPress PHP support lets the ecosystem target faster libraries and newer tooling instead of writing for versions that hit end of life years ago.
The roadmap to WordPress 7.0
The WordPress 7.0 Roadmap sets 7.4.0 as the minimum, but the recommended version is still 8.3. So if your host is presenting 7.4 as the upgrade, that is the floor, not the target. Aim for the 8.x branch, where you get JIT compilation and better memory handling.
<?php
/**
* Example: Checking for PHP version compatibility in a custom plugin.
* We use PHP_VERSION_ID for a clean, integer-based comparison.
*/
function bbioon_check_environment_compatibility() {
if ( PHP_VERSION_ID < 70400 ) {
deactivate_plugins( plugin_basename( __FILE__ ) );
wp_die( 'This plugin requires PHP 7.4 or higher. Please contact your host.' );
}
}
register_activation_hook( __FILE__, 'bbioon_check_environment_compatibility' );Security and backports: what happens to old sites?
Sites still on 7.2 keep working. They stay on the WordPress 6.9 branch. Security releases normally target the latest stable version, but the security team has backported critical fixes as far down as 4.7, so those sites are not instantly exposed. What they lose is everything shipped after early 2026, both major features and plugin updates.
The Gutenberg plugin moves with Core here. Its minimum requirement rises at the same time, so the block editor is not left carrying a runtime that Core has already dropped.
If WordPress PHP support work is eating your dev hours, I can take it off your plate. I have been working with WordPress since the 4.x days.
What to do before April 2026
Check your hosting panel now rather than in April 2026. Anything below 8.0 is behind. For most sites the switch is a dropdown in the control panel plus a few minutes of testing, and it can improve execution speed by around 20%. The official Core Handbook has the full compatibility table if you need to check a specific pairing.
