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Why Do I Need to Upgrade to PHP 7.1+?

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Depending on your host, you may have gotten a rude surprise recently when you tried to update WordPress and got this message:

You cannot update because WordPress 5.2 requires PHP version 5.6.20 or higher. You are running version 5.6.3.

That’s right. Unless you’re running the (extremely old and unsupported) PHP 5.6.20 or greater, you won’t be able to update WordPress again. Ever.

Ideally, your host should be using PHP 7.1+ which is much, much faster than the old 5.x versions, as well as being actively maintained (7.1 and higher get security and other updates regularly).

WordPress is trying to nudge users to move to new versions of PHP for these two main reasons. In addition to not being able to update WordPress, if you’re on old PHP you will also not be able to install themes and plugins that don’t support your version of PHP. Plugins or themes may simple stop working correctly on the older, unsupported PHP versions.

So what can you do?

If you’re on a good host, you won’t have this problem as they will be keeping up with PHP updates or, like SiteGround, will offer you options on which version of PHP to use for your site.

If you’re on a bad host, you’ll find out quickly enough if you ask them to update PHP and they won’t. That means it’s time to move to a good WordPress host. There really is no other option – ask us if you need help choosing a good, high-quality WordPress host.

If you have the option to switch yourself, not so fast… there is a considerable amount of prep you need to do on your site before flipping the switch. Read this guide on how to upgrade WordPress to PHP 7 to understand what’s involved in doing this without breaking your site.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Social Auto Posting, Testimonials Plugins, MemberPress, WordPress in 2019

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Merry Christmas!

This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

In the process of finding a good social media auto poster (that lets you post your new or old blog posts to social media automatically) I came across this review of the best plugins for auto-posting to social sites. These are nice because once configured, you don’t have to do any extra work to get your blog posts out there on multiple sites.

One of the most important things to add to your business website is testimonials – they can really make a difference in developing trust in your users, and getting them to become new customers. Here’s a review of 9 testimonial plugins for WordPress.

One of my favorite, go-to plugins for client sites is mentioned in the post above, Strong Testimonials, and I recommend trying it. You can create multiple Views to display your testimonials in different ways throughout your site, like a rotating sidebar widget vs. a big, sliding home page testimonial.

If you’re using MemberPress to run your WordPress membership site (like WP Minder!) here’s some news for you… MemberPress now includes a downloadable files feature. You can set rules to govern downloads by members and track the number of downloads of each file.

And finally… as we close in on 2019, here are some of the predictions about WordPress in the new year. Lots of changes happening as 5.0 launched along with Gutenberg. Take a look and see what may be in store. This post is more of the developer and WordPress community view, so it might be different than what you’re expecting.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Friday Link Wrapup: Beer, SEO, and Commercial Plugin Directory

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

Craft beer fan, or brewing your own? Here’s a plugin for you: Beer Directory. This plugin allows you to enter details about beers, create categories and control how listings are displayed.

There’s a new directory of commercial WordPress plugins in the works. While the plugin repository on wordpress.org has over 30,000 offerings, to date there’s been no similar resource for commercial plugins.  This new directory is just getting started but should become more useful as it grows.

Are you using an SEO plugin for your site or blog? If not, you should be. These 5 SEO plugins can really make a difference in your search engine rankings. WordPress SEO by Yoast is my weapon of choice.

Is the admin menu on your site out of control? This new plugin can help you tame it by allowing you to re-order the items in the admin menu in a way that works best for you. Check out Admin Menu Manager.

Learn about local WordPress communities around the world in this guide. WordPress is powering around 24% of the world’s websites and these groups are part of the reason why.

Plugin review – Restrict Widgets

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I’ve been using Conditional Widgets for more than a year to control where any given WordPress widget appears (by default, every widget shows up everywhere, which is often not what you want to happen).

On a recent client project, though, Conditional Widgets wouldn’t work, because this particular project had a number of custom post types.

A custom post type is like a special type of blog post – for instance if you have a site about movies, you might have a custom post type for Movies and another custom post type for Actors, that are totally separate from the rest of your blog. It keeps the different types of blog posts from getting displayed together in the same place.

Anyway, Conditional Widgets has a flaw – it doesn’t support custom post types. So my client couldn’t prevent a widget from appearing on certain parts of her site (not without some coding, which my client shouldn’t have to learn).

Happily I found Restrict Widgets. It’s current with WordPress 4.1, has over 29,000 downloads and an average rating of 4.8 out of 5. If you’re looking for a new widget, always look at what others are saying about it! And make sure it works reliably with your version of WordPress. [Read more…] about Plugin review – Restrict Widgets