We are constantly dedicated to bringing you the latest stable versions of PHP as soon as we have thoroughly tested it throughout our environment.

PHP 7.3.0 was released for general availability (GA) on December 6th, 2018 and we are excited to let you know this is now available on MyKinsta. Previously we had the RC versions available for testing, but you can now start thinking about updating your production sites.

Curious how it performs? We tested PHP 7.3 with WordPress 4.9.8, WordPress 5.0, WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads. PHP 7.3 was a clear winner in every single one of our benchmarks.

  • From our findings, PHP 7.3 is on average 9% faster than PHP 7.2. 🚀
  • If you compare PHP 7.3 to PHP 5.6, it can handle almost 3x as many requests (transactions) per second!
WordPress 5.0 PHP benchmarks
WordPress 5.0 PHP benchmarks (the more requests/sec the better)
  • WordPress 5.0 PHP 5.6 benchmark: 91.64 req/sec
  • WordPress 5.0 PHP 7.0 benchmark results: 206.71 req/sec
  • WordPress 5.0 PHP 7.1 benchmark results: 210.98 req/sec
  • WordPress 5.0 PHP 7.2 benchmark results: 229.18 req/sec 
  • WordPress 5.0 PHP 7.3 benchmark results: 253.20 req/sec 🏆

To see the performance of all platforms and more detailed test results, make sure to check out our annual PHP benchmarks report.

Update to PHP 7.3

You can easily change PHP versions from within the MyKinsta dashboard, under Tools, with a single click.

However, even though this is a stable release, we still strongly encourage everyone to test PHP 7.3 in a staging environment first before using it on your live site. In MyKinsta simply select “Staging Environment” from the drop-down and click on “Create a Staging Environment.”

WordPress staging environment
WordPress staging environment

You can then change the PHP Engine for the staging site under “Tools” and start testing to ensure compatibility of your third-party plugins and themes. Once you confirm everything works, you can either change your production site over to PHP 7.3 or if you’ve made any changes, also push your staging site to live.

Change to PHP 7.3
Change to PHP 7.3

Remember that you can switch PHP engines back and forth, so if you encounter compatibility issues with PHP 7.3, you can easily resort back to PHP 7.2. If you were already running an RC version of PHP 7.3, your sites will automatically be updated to PHP 7.3.0-1.

If you’re curious about all of the other changes, check out our in-depth blog post on what’s new with PHP 7.3.