Why You Need to Upgrade to PHP 7 Explained In One Graphic

You need to upgrade your web server to PHP 7 right now. The latest release of PHP came earlier this month on December 3. PHP 7 has been highly anticipated for its various improvements but most notably its improvements in terms of speed and system resource usage.

When I upgraded my server to PHP 7 I was immediately impressed with the speed increase, my WordPress-based site loaded so much faster and everything was much more responsive. But today, when I went to take a look at my servers CPU usage chart, I was in shock. I upgraded to PHP 7 on December 7 — a few days after the initial release and since then… well, have a look.

That chart shows CPU usage on the server for the past 30 days. As you can see prior to my upgrade, CPU usage would spike sometimes as high as 50 percent. Since the upgrade CPU usage has been holding steady at under 10 percent. Incredible.

If this doesn’t make you want to upgrade… I’m not sure what will. Do it. You can thank me later.