At Flywheel, we work hard to ensure our customers have access to the latest versions of PHP, and we typically make those versions available as soon as we’ve completed the necessary testing for all of our customers’ sites. That’s why we’re excited to announce that all new sites created are running on PHP 8.1. 

While PHP 7.4 was made available to customers after its release two years ago, we’ve now made the latest major release — available for all Flywheel customers for sites hosted on the Flywheel Cloud Platform who want to update. 

Note: If your sites are not on the Flywheel Cloud Platform, you’ll need to complete your upgrade before we can help update your site(s) to PHP 8.1. Learn more about your free upgrade to the Flywheel Cloud Platform.

Customers using PHP 7.4 can continue using it on existing sites; however, we will no longer support PHP 7.4 as of November 2022. All new sites will be created with PHP 8.1 as the default.

How to update to PHP 8.1

The great news is that the latest WordPress 6.0 version has the most compatibility with the latest PHP version. Making the switch to PHP 8.1 is easy — open a chat with one of our happiness engineers or submit a ticket from your Flywheel dashboard. Just let us know if you’d like to update to 8.1, and we’ll be happy to help!

As with any major PHP version release, there are some backward compatibility issues that you may need to test before we start moving your sites to PHP 8.1. Additionally, we recommend that the active theme and plugins have been updated. WordPress developers have been hard at work to ensure compatibility with the latest version of PHP and the best experience will happen on the latest version of their work.

If you’d like to read more about PHP 8.1 and its benefits, check out this article or chat with our support team if you have any questions!

Review your sites before updating to PHP 8.1 

Not all your sites may be on the Flywheel Cloud Platform and by visiting app.getflywheel.com, you will have a notification allowing for that free upgrade. PHP 8.1 will not be available until that process has been completed. 

Additionally, as PHP 7.4 approaches its end of life, sites utilizing a version of WordPress prior to 6.0 will need to be upgraded. If sites on your account do need to be upgraded, a notification will be sent noting the deadline for that upgrade. To address this sooner, using the Filter Sites feature on the left side of your Flywheel Dashboard will allow a list of sites not currently running the latest version of WordPress.