Business

Upgrade your PHP

Daniel Lockyer

Daniel Lockyer

— 2 min read

At the end of 2018, PHP 5.6 and 7.0 will reach their end-of-life status and no longer receive future security updates. That means it's time to upgrade your PHP.

On October 22nd, I came up with the idea of creating a microsite to bring awareness to this fact, and to promote some of my freelancing services. I bought the domain and quickly came up with a single static homepage.

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A few days prior, I tweeted about the impending timeline so I had some content to add to the site.

I also had testimonials of my client work and how the upgrade had given real world performance benefits.

Thanks to the guys on WIP, I made plenty of UX and UI improvements over the next 24 hours.

I made a small tool to allow users to check the version of PHP that their site was running.

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I needed a test site so I used the official PHP website. I found they were running an outdated version themselves!

(They have since removed the header and claim to have upgraded to 7.1.)

One of the guys whose images I was using on the site saw my site and posted it on reddit. People were generally positive about the site, and I got some good constructive criticism.

And then 24 hours after initially coming up with the idea, I launched on Product Hunt!

I had 2600 visitors in the first 24 hours and then this jumped up to 7200 within the first 48. My version checker was used over 2700 times.

I ran my tool against the top 1000 sites and found a bunch running outdated versions.

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The site was featured in the Awesome PHP Weekly newsletter and posted on Web Designer News.

It was really good fun to make and launch a site within 24 hours. I learned a lot about what to prioritise and common mistakes people make.

If you're looking to upgrade your PHP, email me at hi@daniellockyer.com!
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