You may have recently seen PHP 5.x warnings in your Joomla Administrator Control Panel. According to PHP.net, PHP 5.6 support will come to an End of Life on December 31, 2018.
PHP 7.x is faster
It is strongly recommended that you upgrade your servers running Joomla CMS to PHP 7.2 as soon as possible. PHP 7.2 is not only more secure, but it is a lot more efficient, expect faster load times and better Joomla website performance. The result is better user experience.
Remember, your Joomla website should be well optimized to load in 2-3 seconds.
Pre-PHP-Upgrade Joomla Checklist
- Backup your Joomla Website – Our choice of a backup extension is Akeeba Backup
- Upgrade all your Joomla Extensions, be sure to check that the extension supports PHP 7.x
- Upgrade your Joomla Template
- Upgrade your Joomla Website
- Perform a quick front-end check to ensure that the website loads fine
- Backup once more and download a backup locally to your computer
Changing PHP version in cPanel
Login to your cPanel, in the searh box enter PHP to quickly locate your PHP version selection setting.
Next, select PHP 7.2 from the dropdown (you may need to enable specific PHP libraries) and hit “Set as current”.
As a last step, open your Joomla website’s front end and review various pages to ensure no errors are being reported.
If you are seeing blank/white screens, immediately revert your PHP version back to version 5.6 and contact us today for professional Joomla support
