With the recent release of PHP 8.3, the Kinsta team has been working to make this “latest and greatest” version available to our Managed WordPress Hosting customers. Our own WordPress benchmarking showed speed increases when the CMS is hosted on PHP 8.3, and now we’re excited to announce that the release is available in all Kinsta environments.

Some tips before you change PHP versions

PHP 8.3 has some interesting new features and appears to run WordPress faster, but any change of the PHP version running behind your WordPress website should be tackled with care.

Here are some important tips:

  • Backup! Before embarking on any major changes to key components of your website — including the underlying PHP — create a backup.
  • Some WordPress plugins and themes might not be compatible with PHP 8.3 so soon after its release. Kinsta’s support team can’t help with code compatibility issues, so do some research to confirm that your site’s add-ons support PHP 8.3 before upgrading.
  • Even after research into plugin and theme compatibility, we still recommend an initial test of a PHP upgrade using a staging environment. Move on to your live site if your staging site can perform without errors.
  • If you follow the above steps and then run into trouble after switching to PHP 8.3, we recommend downgrading to your last working version of PHP and seeking help from a qualified developer or the authors of any plugins or themes that failed with the PHP 8.3 upgrade.

How to switch to PHP 8.3

To upgrade a WordPress site to PHP 8.3, log in to MyKinsta and navigate to the site’s Tools tab.

Under the PHP Engine option, click Modify and choose PHP 8.3 from the dropdown menu:

Screenshot showing the selection of version 8.3 in MyKinsta's PHP engine tool.
Selecting an alternate PHP version using the PHP engine tool.

After selecting a PHP version from the dropdown, you will be asked to confirm your choice:

Screenshot showing the confirmation dialog for changing PHP versions.
Confirming your choice to modify PHP engine settings.

The switch to a different version of PHP will take a few minutes. The PHP engine will restart to load the new version, making your WordPress dashboard unavailable for a couple of seconds. Your site’s frontend should not be affected.

When the entire process is complete, you will receive a notification within MyKinsta.

Kinsta is home to fast WordPress sites

PHP 8.3 isn’t the only thing making WordPress sites fast at Kinsta. Running on the Google Cloud Platform’s fastest VMs, Kinsta’s infrastructure also takes advantage of Google’s low-latency Premium Tier network.

On top of that is our blazingly fast CDN with 260+ PoPs, HTTP/3 support, edge caching, early hints, and built-in image optimization.

Find a Managed WordPress Hosting package here at Kinsta that’s right for you.