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In the vast landscape of web hosting services, choosing the right type can significantly impact the performance, security, and scalability of your website. There are various options available, which makes it crucial to understand the...
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Are you looking to customize the Minecraft game setup or add players to your fantasy world? If this is the case, you’ll need a Minecraft server hosting provider. However, due…
The post 5 Best Minecraft Server Hosting Providers (And How to Choose One) first appeared on WPArena and is written by Editorial Staff.
VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting is an excellent option if you’re looking for a secure and reliable solution for your website. With VPS hosting, you’ll have complete control over your server environment, allowing you to...
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Hey folks! If you’ve been keeping up with the latest DigitalOcean news, you might be aware that we recently announced our acquisition of a company called Cloudways. In case you’re curious about what this means, we thought it might be helpful to share a short description of Cloudways and why we’re pumped to have them join the DO and CSS-Tricks family!
Many of the technologies and tricks we love at CSS-Tricks make it easier for us and you to design cool websites and build applications. One of the reasons DigitalOcean was excited to team up with CSS-Tricks is that we love helping developers and small technology-powered businesses do what they love. At DigitalOcean and CSS-Tricks, we strive to do this through education and products that make your lives easier.
And this is why Cloudways was so interesting to our team. Cloudways offers managed hosting right on top of a cloud provider. So, in addition to the 24/7 support, back-ups, monitoring, SSL, optimized caching, and other benefits you get from a managed host, you also get to deploy from Cloudways on a variety of cloud providers (including DigitalOcean, among others, of course!) in a few easy clicks.
That means you gain a bunch of things, like speedy CDN delivery, serverless functions, and Kubernetes — basically everything you’d want from a cloud provider — baked right into a managed hosting plan that lets you deploy a new site in minutes.
We are happy to go more in-depth into Cloudways offerings and how they might be relevant to designers and front-end developers if that’s helpful. Let us know in the comments if you’d like to learn more!
If you’re ready to start exploring, you can test out Cloudways with a $50 credit on us!
To Shared Link — Permalink on CSS-Tricks
DigitalOcean Welcomes Cloudways to the Family originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.
WooSesh kicked off this week with a keynote session from WooCommerce CEO Paul Maiorana, who gave an overview of the current state of the ecosystem. More than 3.4 million websites use WooCommerce, according to Builtwith, including 25% of the top million online stores. It is by far the most popular solution among WordPress sites with e-commerce, capturing 93% of the market share.
Maiorana covered some industry-wide trends taking shape in 2023. WooCommerce merchants are uncertain about the economy and while some are optimistic, others do not see it improving soon. Although growth has slowed since the pandemic-fueled rapid acceleration towards e-commerce in 2021, Maiorana said revenues are projected to gain steadily through 2025.
WooCommerce core is entering a transformative time, as the new admin has been fully merged and Cart and Checkout blocks are now part of core (in beta). The plugin is becoming more block friendly with more than 40 blocks available now. WooCommerce has seen a 319% increase in the usage of block themes and is aiming to have full out-of-the-box compatibility with any block-based theme.
One of the biggest announcements from the event was that WooCommerce is developing its own hosted, turnkey solution in collaboration with hosting partners. WordPress.com will be the first to pilot the product in February 2023. Maiorana said the goal of the solution is to improve onboarding and retention with the following :
WooCommerce’s hosted solution will be in direct competition with other hosts that have recently launched their own products.
In November 2021, GoDaddy acquired Pagely with the intent to deploy a new SaaS WooCommerce product. Pagely was paired with previous 2020 acquisitions of Poynt, a payment processor, and SkyVerge, a popular WooCommerce plugin development company, to create an integrated solution. Last month, GoDaddy launched an open access preview of Managed WooCommerce Stores to US-based customers.
GoDaddy’s solution boasts the ability to sync across marketplaces, including Amazon, eBay, Google, Walmart, Etsy, and YouTube, with a single dashboard managing payment processing, marketing, shipping, and inventory. It is integrated with GoDaddy Payments for both online and in-person transactions, which incur a transaction fee of 2.3% + 30¢. The hosted WooCommerce preview plans range from $99.99/month – $249.99/month.
At WooSesh today, Beka Rice, Senior Director of Product Management at GoDaddy, gave an overview of multichannel and omnichannel sales for e-commerce merchants during her presentation. Enabling multichannel store management seems to be one of the main selling points of GoDaddy’s offering.
Bluehost is another recent contender in the managed WooCommerce hosting space, having launched its product last month. In March, Newfold Digital, Bluehost’s parent company, acquired YITH, a WordPress plugin company with more than 100 WooCommerce extensions. Bluehost’s managed WooCommerce packages include a curated set of YITH plugins to help merchants extend their stores to offer gift cards, bookings and appointments, wishlists, product filtering, and more.
Bluehost offers two plans. For the first year, when billed yearly, customers pay $9.95/month for a simple store or $12.95/month for selling across various marketplaces. Customers on the more expensive plan have the option to manage product inventory across Etsy, Amazon and eBay from a consolidated dashboard via Ecomdash. At the budget end of the WooCommerce hosting spectrum, Bluehost’s offering has an emphasis on creating a user-friendly, guided onboarding experience.
Bluehost conducted an internal research study last year and found that its small business customers were looking for solutions that would allow them to sell online, but many of them are first-time website creators. The company created this new WooCommerce offering to eliminate the hassle of navigating themes and the many plugins required to launch a store.
Bluehost uses YITH’s Wonder theme as the stores starting theme, which we reviewed in August.
“Our theme is built for WordPress, utilizes the block structure that modern WordPress websites are beginning to adopt (one of the early block-based
WooCommerce block themes) and also includes three full-page patterns for different homepage layouts and designs,” Newfold Digital SVP of Digital Presence and Commerce Jason Cross said.
“This not only provides users with a modern looking store, but also allows them to continue to customize it with ease in the future. YITH Wonder comes with six different style variations that make it easy to customize the accent color combinations and typography for the site.”
Bluehost’s offering is aimed at catering to the merchants who will be building the stores themselves. The company has not created its own payments solution but connects to popular payment providers such as PayPal and Stripe and offers cash on delivery and in-store pickup options.
WooCommerce is at the start of its journey towards launching a hosted solution but the company also plays a different role in the ecosystem as the maintainer of the core software. In an interview with the Tavern after his keynote, Maiorana said the vast majority (+90%) of ongoing WooCommerce core development is done by the WooCommerce team at Automattic.
“One important difference is that we are really focused on the WooCommerce ecosystem – including the thousands of web hosts that help support and drive WordPress and Woo adoption across the globe – as our most important ‘customer,'” he said.
“And what we’re hearing from these customers is that it is challenging to compete with the simplicity offered by proprietary, turnkey e-commerce solutions. At the same time, many web hosts don’t have the capabilities to address things like onboarding, conversion, and retention holistically – they need our help to compete and win.”
Many of the major hosting companies that serve WordPress customers, like WP Engine, GoDaddy, and Bluehost have already developed their own hosted WooCommerce solutions, although there are many smaller companies that do not offer curated plugins, themes, and friendly onboarding that may be more open to partnering with the makers of WooCommerce.
“We’re also working with a ‘core first’ perspective,” Maiorana said. “That means that our efforts here will help drive improvements directly back into the core WooCommerce experience and across other, related extensions. We want to take everything we learn and any benefits we discover back to every WooCommerce user.
“We think the winning strategy for the WooCommerce community is not to split efforts or keep these innovations to ourselves, but instead work together to make WooCommerce better for everyone.”
Maiorana could not share any more details of the solution they are developing, but with more than 800 products in the WooCommerce.com marketplace, the company has the ability to offer a compelling deal on extensions for those who host with them. WooCommerce is also currently beta testing WooPay, a single-click cross-site checkout experience that uses WooCommerce Payments. Integrating WooPay with WooCommerce’s network of hosting customers may also give the new checkout (and WooCommerce Payments) a major boost.
With WooCommerce soon to be in the running with its solution hosted on WordPress.com, the competition around managed e-commerce hosting is starting to heat up. It may no longer be enough for hosting companies to simply offer WooCommerce and Storefront pre-installed. Although the largest hosting companies have been acquiring WooCommerce plugin shops in order to create compelling packages of store functionality, there’s room for diverse offerings in a wide range of pricing tiers, as WooCommerce adoption continues to grow.
SiteGround launched a new managed Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) hosting product today, the first of its kind among WordPress hosts. The company currently powers more than 2,800,000 domains and is targeting small businesses and digital product creators with new plans that make it easy to onboard new EDD store owners.
Plans range from $2.99/mo. (1 website) to $7.99/mo. (Unlimited Websites, 40GB web space, 400k visits monthly). The plans are priced identically to SiteGround’s managed WordPress hosting plans, but they are pre-loaded with EDD, a free EDD theme (Vendd), All in One SEO plugin, MonsterInsights, the WPForms plugin, and OptinMonster. SiteGround is aiming to flatten out the learning curve associated with launching a digital product store by weaving all these plugins together with a guided onboarding tour.
One year ago, Awesome Motive acquired Sandhills Development, the creators of EDD, along with the company’s other WordPress products and services. Awesome Motive reports that over 50,000 website owners are using EDD to sell eBooks, digital art, music, PDFs, software licenses, and other digital products. The new EDD managed hosting is the result of a partnership between SiteGround and Awesome Motive.
“There is a growing demand for eCommerce hosting optimized for digital creators,” SiteGround CEO Tenko Nikolov said. “We’re excited to partner with Easy Digital Downloads to offer best-in-class hosting experience, so creators can focus on growing their business with confidence without worrying about the technical side.”
This article was originally published on 1/5/14
The countdown for 2015 has already begun and so are the businesses eager to roll out new strategies and technical innovations with the New Year. Especially the entrepreneurs. 2014 has been a year of many ups and downs for most ventures due to the various algorithm updates rolled out by the search giant.
Kevin Ohashi from Review Signal has published the 2022 WordPress and WooCommerce hosting performance benchmarks. These benchmarks are some of the most trusted review sources in the hosting industry due to Ohashi’s transparent methodology. No hosting company sponsors the work. Instead, Ohashi charges a standard, publicly documented fee for participation that covers the cost of the tests.
In 2022, Ohashi tested 33 companies with 79 different plans across seven different price tiers, including the WooCommerce tier.
If speed is one of your chief concerns when selecting a hosting company, these performance reviews may be of interest. The benchmarks include a Load Storm test designed to simulate real users visiting the site, logging in, and browsing (uncached performance). They also test cached performance, SSL, WP queries per second, performance on some computational and database operations, and a WebPageTest that fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world.
The results are easy to examine at a glance. Top Tier (Full Star) status is given to hosts that perform well under the battery of tests:
Top Tier WordPress Hosting (Full Star)
This is awarded to companies who maintain 99.9% uptime throughout the entire testing and show little to no performance degradation during load testing, primarily focused on error rate and consistent response times. Error rates above 0.1% and response times above 1000ms* will keep a company away from achieving Top Tier marks.
In the budget <$25/Month category, the 2022 Top Tier winners included 20i, 34SP, EasyWP by Namecheap, Eco Web Hosting, GreenGeeks, HostXNow, ICDSoft, LightningBase, MechanicWeb, Pressable, SiteGround, and WPX.
On the other end of the spectrum, in the Enterprise tier ($500+/month), there were far fewer participants but the majority of them achieved Top Tier status, including Performant Websites, Presslabs, Scaleforce powered by Virtuozzo, Servebolt (Scale + ACD), Servebolt, and WordPress VIP.
This is the second year Ohashi has performed WooCommerce hosting reviews. The tests are performed on a WooCommerce dummy website with Storefront set as the theme and sample products loaded.
Top Tier winners for WooCommerce hosting include GreenGeeks, Pressable, Servebolt, and WordPress.com. Two others achieved Honorable Mentions – ICDSoft and SiteGround.
Clicking on “View full results” for any of the tiers will show a detailed breakdown of all the tests with comparison charts and summaries for each host participating.
“I think the most remarkable trend is how fast things are getting,” Ohashi said. “For example if we look at the enterprise tier from 2021 vs 2022, the fastest average response time (Static test) was 9ms and 6.4ms and p95 was 41ms to 20ms. The 3rd fastest p95 last year was 65ms which would be 7th (out of 9) fastest this year if you moved it.
“Despite the numbers already being staggeringly fast already, the whole cohort accelerated even faster.
“And it’s not just at the high end, at the <25 tier, on the Static test there was 1 company with under 100ms p95 last year (CynderHost – 61ms). This year you have three – Pressable (18ms), SiteGround (67ms), WPX (89ms).
“At the slow end, the slowest <25 Static average response time was 267ms, last year there were 5 companies with equal or slower averages (max being over 1200ms).”
Ohashi said there may be some selection bias as companies who do badly may not want to participate again and filter themselves out.
“But some of those companies improved quite a bit like GoDaddy was 295ms to 234ms which is a 61ms improvement,” he said. “I want to call out the companies who have sometimes struggled on these tests, and keep participating. I respect them and it makes me happy to see them making continuous improvements.
“While I do give awards for companies who do well, I think it’s important to recognize that not doing as well isn’t a failure, it’s about what the companies do with that information and how they improve their services. Overall, it seems everyone is improving and that’s a win for hosts and consumers alike.”
Ohashi said one of his goals for 2022 is talking with the companies to explain the value of participating. Beyond the value of the benchmarks themselves, these reviews help the ecosystem push for better performance. One of Ohashi’s testing policies is a big driver for this:
“The hosting packages are as close to default as possible. In some circumstances where turning on performance enhancements is very simple, e.g. clicking an option to turn on caching, this will be done. These changes must be obvious or communicated clearly in the welcome email so that every user is guaranteed to at least be presented the option. Otherwise everything is as-is for new customers upon sign up to avoid, as much as possible, the extra benefit of companies knowing they are being tested.”
Companies that do well in these tests are those that have embraced performance by default, so that any performance improving technology is already turned on or presented proactively to customers.
“One of the things I got a degree in is economics and we talk about opt-in vs opt-out policies like organ donation and how defaults can drastically influence outcomes,” Ohashi said. “By forcing opt-in performance improvements, I don’t know how many thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of sites have been positively impacted by these benchmarks without ever being aware because hosting companies are forced to enable better defaults.”
Ohashi also works with the companies on things that do not make it into the benchmarks, such as pointing out issues with onboarding/UI/UX experience and reporting bugs.
“I’ve probably used more different WordPress hosting companies than anyone else in the world at this point (I have to be in the top 10 doing these benchmarks for a decade right?),” he said. “If I cannot figure out how to do something in your system, it’s probably your system, not me. I truly want to see everyone do better, because everyone wins in that scenario and I will try to help as much as I can to make that happen.”
Check out the 2022 WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks for a more detailed breakdown of all the different pricing tiers and a full explanation of the testing methodology. Past years’ benchmarks are also available on the website. This year Load Storm went out of business, so Ohashi replicated the tests into k6. All of his load testing scripts are open source and available on GitHub, so others are welcome to use them for testing their own sites or building their own testing suites.
What Is Email Hosting Email hosting is a service where a hosting provider rents out the email servers to its customers. While there are brands out there offering email hosting services absolutely free of cost,...
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Programmers often need to run some recurring process automatically at fixed intervals or at specific times. A common solution for this problem is to use a cron job. When you have full access to your own server, configuring cron jobs is quite straightforward. However, how hard is it to configure cron jobs when you use an application hosting service? Some services, thankfully, provide a way for you to do this.
In this article, we’ll walk through a sample mini-project that shows how to easily set up and deploy a cron job on Render.
WordPress hosting company Convesio has raised $5 million from private investors. This funding round includes some of the company’s original investors who participated in Convesio’s 2019 Wefunder crowdfunding campaign, which brought in more than $1 million from 800+ investors.
“I started Convesio because legacy hosting providers have not evolved their technology, struggled to provide high uptime, and lacked the capability to scale WordPress on demand,” Fenelli said.
Convesio aims to make enterprise level hosting more accessible to customers with smaller budgets. Its Docker-powered platform allows sites to auto-scale up and down as necessary. It will automatically deploy multiple containers to handle higher loads and bills additional containers at an hourly rate.
“Traditional hosts put you on a plan to handle the highest level of resources your website needs, even if you only need them 5 hours a month,” Fanelli said. “It’s like leasing a Ferrari to use it for your daily commuting because you also take it to the track for a few laps once a month.”
Convesio is aiming to take on the larger, more established hosting companies by ‘productizing’ scalability in order to keep costs down. The company boasts that customers can deploy a WordPress site with load balancers, a database cluster, and redundant file system in under a minute, without hiring a SysAdmin. Convesio’s target market is agencies, designers, and developers.
“Agencies are a one-to-many sale, easier to support, and early adopters of technology,” Fanelli said when launching their first funding campaign. “All these reasons make them a really good fit for what we do. They also have to manage a lot of WordPress sites, so issues like speed, performance, scaling etc are all compounded when you have 100 sites.”
With this second round of funding, Convesio plans to hire more staff, boost sales and marketing, and accelerate development.
This post is originally published on Designmodo: Best Static Website Hosting Providers
Do you know that 1 out of 4 users will abandon a website if it takes more than 4 seconds to load? Studies show that just 1 second of delay reduces customer satisfaction by 16% that translates into a drastic …
For more information please contact Designmodo
Web hosting is not an accessible business. You cannot settle for a web host without indulging in a bit of deep thought. The success and failure of your WordPress website depend on the best hosting...
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This post is originally published on Designmodo: How to Quickly Deploy a Static Website Online with Static.app
In recent years, static websites have gone from simple layout pages to becoming a widely used ecosystem to power-up robust SEO-friendly and lightning fast websites. Because of the wide range of benefits it offers, static websites are now used to …
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Using an outdated version of WordPress core, plugins, or themes puts your site at risk. PHP is no different.
While WordPress technically works with some older versions of PHP, you’re sacrificing performance and compatibility, while opening yourself up to security vulnerabilities by using these.
For safety and stability, always aim to use the WordPress recommended versions of PHP.
In this post, we’ll talk about how to check what version of PHP you are running, how to update your PHP to the recommended version for WordPress, and how a capable hosting provider can take care of these elements for you.
Jump Links for this Article:
If you look in your WordPress site folders, you’ll see a lot of PHP files.
Since PHP powers a bulk of the core WordPress software, it’s a highly essential language for the WordPress community.
PHP runs on various platforms (Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, etc.), and is compatible with almost all servers used today (Apache, IIS, etc.).
Not only is it a major part of WordPress, but a major part of the whole web, powering 70% of all websites.
WordPress supports many versions of PHP, some even obsolete, but as a general rule you should use only those with security or stable support.
WordPress core officially supports PHP 5.6.20 to PHP 8.0; however, not all themes or plugins are supported.
WordPress currently works best with the following versions:
PHP has to be updated on a regular basis, just like WordPress core, themes, and plugins.
With PHP, each version receives support for two years after its initial release, then there is a period of another year where only critical security updates are released, as needed.
After this three year period, that version of PHP is no longer supported.
As of July 2021, the current recommended PHP version for WordPress is 7.4 or greater.
Quality hosting providers will generally require you to use the WP recommended version of PHP in order to use their servers, and will help you modify your site to ensure that the latest version of PHP will not break it.
For example, we’ll refer to ourselves (hey, we’re proud of our hosting!). WPMU DEV Hosting provides your site(s) with the latest sanctioned PHP versions.
Upgrading (or downgrading) to various versions is a simple process, done through our Hub 2.0.
Occasionally, some third party plugins may be out of date and cause issues with the latest version of PHP.
In that case you can look for updates, alternatives, or if necessary, downgrade your PHP version to an older one (as long as it’s still actively supported with security patch releases).
Click here if you’re interested in our full documentation on PHP through managed hosting in WPMU DEV.
Less reputable, cheap hosts will not take the initiative to encourage you to upgrade your PHP because of the additional cost of support time and resources to help you transition.
Since they don’t want to break your site by updating to newer, recommended versions of PHP, they’ll often leave your site to use outdated versions of PHP and hope it goes unnoticed.
PHP 7.2 made its debut in November 2017. Considering the three year rule, we know it reached its End of Life cycle in November 2020 (as well as the even older PHP versions prior).
This means more than one-third (37.2%) of WordPress sites are currently running versions of PHP that are no longer actively supported.
That’s not the worst of it. Historically, there have been extended periods of time where that number has hovered at and even exceeded two-thirds (66%)! This is problematic for several reasons.
For one, there are tremendous performance benefits that come with using the latest version.
According to speed tests conducted by Kinsta, across 7 versions of PHP, consider the following stats:
You can see from the above table that with each newer version of PHP, the requests per second get incrementally faster.
Since using the recommended version of PHP takes less time to serve the same number of requests, you can give your visitors a much better user experience.
Kinsta also tested on PHP version 8, and I did want to note the scores for it, as the improvements in speed really continue to trend upwards.
With a benchmark result of 233.40 requests per second, PHP 8.0 takes a giant leap over PHP 7.4, proving to be 18.5% faster.
Step back a few more versions to 7.0, and it actually handles 50% more requests per second, comparatively.
I didn’t include PHP version 8.0 in my chart, because its support in the general WordPress purlieu is very difficult to assess. (WordPress 5.6 is presently considered beta compatible with PHP 8.0.)
Knowing this, please proceed with caution and do thorough testing before upgrading any crucial or client sites to PHP 8.0.
Maintaining code takes effort, and that effort is multiplied when you need to ensure backward compatibility for additional versions.
There is a collective sigh of relief among overworked theme and plugin developers whenever WordPress bumps up the minimum recommended PHP version, effectively knocking another obsolete version (and all of its associated coding efforts) off the table.
Rather than spending time parsing through the code to ensure that any changes to PHP do not affect it, developers can spend their time adding new features or improving security instead.
Just like plugins, themes, and WordPress core get updates to fix security vulnerabilities, so does PHP.
This is also why using a PHP version that still gets updates is so important; it protects you from vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, XSS and DoS attacks.
According to security vulnerability datasource CVE Details, there were only 2 known vulnerabilities found in PHP in 2021 YTD.
Compare this to the 14 vulnerabilities discovered in 2020, the 23 noted in 2018, and the 105 found in 2016, and you can see why updating can help protect you from many known security exploits.
It’s a matter of fact that some hackers look to see what version of PHP you’re running to determine what kind of attack would be effective.
The first step in compatibility is knowing what version of PHP your site is using.
You can easily see this information right within the WordPress dashboard.
Go to: Tools > Site Health > Status.
If your site should be using a newer version of PHP, it will be shown under recommended improvement.
If it is, then open the passed tests section to verify. You’ll see that it says Your site is running the current version of PHP, followed by the version number in parentheses.
Alternately, you can go to Tools > Site Health > Info > Server from your site Dashboard, to see what version of PHP you’re using.
WP dashboard settings to view PHP version info.
Once you check to see what version of PHP your hosting server is running, you’ll know if you need to upgrade to the latest version of PHP.
If you do, checking your site’s compatibility with the new version of PHP is imperative. You never want to test major changes like updating your PHP on your live site, because if there are major incompatibilities, you could seriously impede or cripple your site.
For this reason, it’s ideal to create an alternate site where you can test your changes first.
Start by getting a copy of your current site. You’ll need all of the files and a copy of the database.
You can do this by using SFTP for your files and exporting a copy of your database using MyPHP.
In some instances, you may be able to use your last backup, if your backups include both the files and the database.
You could lessen the load by using a plugin made specifically for this task. Duplicator is a free plugin offered on WP.org that has positive reviews.
If you want the most streamlined, painless process for duplicating your site, and you’re already using WPMU DEV as your hosting provider, it’s your lucky day!! Cloning is already a part of your membership!
With a few simple points and clicks through our Hub 2.0, you’ll have fully configured, deployment ready WP Sites in mere minutes.
Not already hosting with us but want to get on the bandwagon?! No problem, just click here.
For more details, see our documentation on cloning sites through WPMU DEV hosting.
Once you have a copy of your site, you’ll need to set up a testing environment. You can either use a local environment or set up a staging environment if your host allows it*.
We have a great post on how to set up XAMPP on your local computer if you need help setting up your local environment.
Once your testing environment is set up, you can add the files and database from the previous step to your testing environment, so you have an exact replica of your live site.
After you have a copy of your site in your testing environment set up, you’re ready to upgrade the PHP version of your testing site.
*Hosting through WPMU DEV includes the ability to create a staging environment, and it is a breeze to do. Click here for details.
Now comes the fun part, and by fun, I mean the tedious task of QC-ing.
You’ll need to go through your test site to make sure that nothing is broken.
Pay careful attention to the critical functionality of your site. Check out processes, newsletter signups, comments, web forms, navigation, and all of the other elements that contribute to expected usability and visitor engagement.
You want to catch any issues before they have a chance to wreak havoc on your live site and cause a bad user experience for your visitors or clients.
There are some tools that can assist with the QC process, for devs and non-devs alike. Any issues discovered that are outside your scope of knowledge can be intelligently relayed to support.
Error Log Monitor – This plugin will display a list of PHP issues as an error log in your WordPress dashboard.
WP_DEBUG – Not a plugin, rather a PHP constant (aka, a permanent global variable), this can be used to trigger debug mode throughout WordPress.
Turning on WP_DEBUG will allow you to see the PHP failure types so that you can fix them in your code. It also allows you to see any deprecated functions that are running on your site (ie, those that exist in WP but are no longer the standard way to perform a particular task).
To turn on debugging, head to your WordPress install files, open the wp-config.php file (located in the root directory), and add the following line of code near the bottom:
If that line of code already exists but says false, change it to true.
Check out this article from our blog, for a more indepth look at using WP_DEBUG.
If a plugin or theme is causing issues, work out the issue first on your test site, and find a suitable alternative that is compatible with the latest version of PHP.
Once you’ve found a solution, head over to your live site and make the changes there.
When you’re looking for a suitable plugin in the WordPress repository, remember to check what versions of PHP are supported.
Once you’ve worked through all of the bugs and kinks with compatibility, you can either push staging to live, or make any necessary changes to the live site, and then change the PHP version on your live site.
This process will vary from host to host, but will most likely involve changing a setting in your hosting cPanel. Some shared hosts will not let you access this setting, in which case you’ll need to reach out to them for assistance.
Here’s a list with instructions on how to update the PHP version for a collection of popular hosts, including WP Engine, Pantheon, Kinsta, Pagely, Bluehost, Hostgator, GoDaddy, and more.
Hosting with WPMU DEV includes our Hub interface, which greatly streamlines changing your PHP version.
Accessing PHP settings via WPMU DEV’s Hub.
If you prefer a simple solution with a clean UI for checking or updating PHP versions, give WPMU DEV hosting a try, and take one more task off your plate.
Would you rather be in a Pretty Horrible Position, or a Professionally Happy Place? Rhetorical question… I really just wanted to play with that acronym. :)
Cheap, shared hosting has convinced a lot of people that hosting websites is a simple and straightforward process. The truth is, there is a lot that goes into maintaining your site files and database.
Keeping all of your software up-to-date is one of the tasks that your host can and should help you with.
If they’re unwilling to help you, or hide versions to keep you in the dark, that’s a red flag that you can do much better, and should seriously consider switching hosts.
At WPMU DEV, our hosting (backed by Digital Ocean) leads the industry in value.
Not only do we help you update your PHP version, we also provide a big ole goody bag of features, such as security, caching configuration, uptime monitoring, dedicated IP, nightly backups, free & automated migration, website analytics, and more.
If you ever need help on compatibility issues with your themes or plugins, or have questions about anything WP, our top-rated support team is ready to jump in and assist, 24/7.
Also, every hosting plan is covered by our full 30-day money back guarantee (we’ll happily refund 100% of your money if you decide you don’t like it).
Whether you host with us or elsewhere, keep in mind how much value your host can and should provide.
Choose a company you can trust to take care of those automation and update tasks, like keeping your PHP version current with WP recommendations.
Don’t let subpar hosting steal your focus. You should be able to devote your time and energies to the finer details; making your sites shine with the talents that set you apart from the competition.
This is new stuff from DO.
App Platform is a hosting product, no surprise there, but it has some features that are Jamstack-inspired in the best possible way, and an additional set of unique and powerful features. Let’s start with some basics:
That’s the stuff that developers like me are loving these days. Take some of the hardest, toil-laden, no-fun aspects of web development and entirely do them for me.
And now the drumroll:
Use that link to get $100 in credit over 60 days.
You snag it right from GitHub (or GitLab, or Docker Hub), which is great right away, and off you go.
Then we get our first little hint of something compelling right away:
But let’s say we don’t need that immediately, we can go with a free plan and get this out.
The site will build and you can see logs:
And lookie that my static site is LIVE!
Say my site needs to run an actual build process? That, and lots more configuration come in the form of an “App Spec”. This is where I would include those build commands, change Git information, deployment zones, and loads more.
Wasn’t that interesting to see the setup steps for this static site suggest adding a database? So many sites need some kind of data store, and it’s often left up to developers to go find some kind of cloud-accessible data storage that will work well with their app. With Digital Ocean App Platform, it can live right alongside your static app.
It’s called a component.
As you can see, it can be, but doesn’t have to be a Database. It could be another type of server! Here I could pop a PostgreSQL DB on there for just $7/month.
If what you need to add is an internal or external service, it will let you add that via another Git repo that you hook up. Oh my what a modern system you now have. A front end and a back end each individually deployable directly via Git itself.
This feels big to me! I get that same kinda easy DX feeling I get with static sites, but with, say, a Python or Ruby on Rails app. Free deployment! Server boxes I don’t have to configure and manage myself!
Seems like a pretty happy-path hosting environment for lots of stuff.
Use that link to get $100 in credit over 60 days.
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