WordPress 7.0 is officially dropping support for PHP 7.2 and 7.3 when it ships in April 2026. If you have been following the Core development cycle, this shouldn’t come as a shock. For everyone else, it’s a necessary refactor of our collective technical debt. For years, WordPress PHP support has been a balancing act between backward compatibility and modern security standards. Now, the baseline is shifting to PHP 7.4.0.
Why the Minimum Version Bump is Overdue
In the world of professional development, we often talk about the “5% rule.” Historically, the WordPress project waits until a PHP version’s usage falls below 5% before retiring it. Specifically, combined usage for 7.2 and 7.3 has plummeted below 4%. Furthermore, maintaining support for these ancient branches isn’t just a matter of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” It’s about the massive overhead in automated testing and the inability to use modern language features like arrow functions or typed properties in Core.
I’ve spent 14 years wrestling with legacy environments. I once had a client on a VPS running PHP 5.6 in 2022. Every single plugin update was a race condition waiting to happen. By increasing the floor for WordPress PHP support, the ecosystem can finally move toward more performant libraries and AI-driven tooling without being shackled by versions that reached their “End of Life” (EOL) years ago.
The Roadmap to WordPress 7.0
If you’re tracking the WordPress 7.0 Roadmap, you know that 7.4.0 is the new minimum, but the recommended version remains 8.3. Consequently, if your hosting provider is still nudging you toward 7.4, they are doing you a disservice. You should be aiming for the 8.x branch to take advantage of JIT compilation and improved memory management.
<?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?
What about sites stuck on 7.2? They won’t just vanish. They will remain on the WordPress 6.9 branch. While official security updates usually focus on the latest stable version, the security team has a history of backporting critical fixes as far down as version 4.7. Therefore, your site won’t be an immediate “sitting duck,” but you will be locked out of every major feature and plugin update released after early 2026.
This change also applies to the Gutenberg plugin. The minimum requirements are moving in lockstep with Core to ensure the block editor doesn’t become a bottleneck for performance. Therefore, the long-term maintainability of the project depends on this transition.
Look, if this WordPress PHP support stuff is eating up your dev hours, let me handle it. I’ve been wrestling with WordPress since the 4.x days.
Final Takeaway for Business Owners
Don’t wait until April 2026 to realize your site is incompatible. Check your hosting panel today. If you’re on anything lower than 8.0, you are already behind. Upgrading PHP is usually a 10-minute task that can yield a 20% boost in execution speed. Specifically, check out the official Core Handbook for a full breakdown of compatibility. Don’t let legacy code rot your business infrastructure.
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