There is a lot that goes in behind the scenes of any website. What you see on screen requires multiple programming languages to get the pixels to display your website perfectly. Some also take longer to load than others, so when improvements to the languages are released, we jump on them quickly so that our websites can run better.One of the main languages we use to build websites is PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) has just recently received an update and we have rolled that update across all of our maintenance clients. Let’s delve deeper into this so you can get a better understanding of what is happening...

What is PHP

PHP is a scripting language that works “behind the scenes” on the server. It passes the information from the server to other scripting languages (eg: HTML) to present the information on the screen. PHP 7 is the newest version of this scripting language. The last version was PHP 5 released way back in 2004.

What are the benefits of PHP 7

The main benefit of PHP 7 include:

• Drastically improved performance. In the speed tests we have performed on the upgraded websites, many seconds have been reduced from load times (see example below).
• This not only means that customers can find the information they are seeking from your website faster, but it is also a major ranking factor in today’s major search engines.
• There has also been improvements to memory consumption, error reporting and random number generation.

What does this mean for your website

• If you are one of our monthly maintenance clients, we have already upgraded your website to run off PHP 7.
• You should enjoy faster load times and better performance.
• If your website is not running PHP 7, we highly recommend that you contact your website provider to upgrade your website’s software.

Other Advantages

Google and other search engines have indicated that your website load times are considered when determining what rank your website should display at. The faster your page loads, the better chance your website will get on the first page of Google.It doesn’t have to stop there! At Bang, we can do a complete site audit and fix up other performance issues on your website including minimizing the size of large images and script files.If you think your website would benefit from this upgrade (and you are not a maintenance client), contact Bang Digital today and let us help!