Woo 11.6 wants PHP 8.1

MellowThistle0520

I went through our client shops this morning after reading this. Most sit on 8.2 or 8.3 already, but two are still on 7.4 because they're on old shared plans nobody touched since 2021.

https://developer.woocommerce.com/2026/09/29/php-8-1-requirement/

So February. Fine.

The PHP switch itself is not the problem. The problem is the old extensions on those two shops, because one of them runs a Mollie Payments for WooCommerce 7.3.x that has not been updated in ages and I'm not sure it survives 8.1 without a fight.

I'm not touching either of them before Black Friday; You'd have to be mad.

after that we'll see.

Atif

MellowThistle0520 wrote
after that we'll see.

No, "after that" is the wrong order. February is the date Woo stops installing on 7.4. It isn't the date 7.4 became a problem. That was November 2022.

https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php

In your case those two shops have been running a PHP with no security fixes for almost four years already.. Black Friday on that is the risky bit - not the upgrade.

And staying on 11.5 after the cut doesn't keep you safe either. Woo backports fixes to the previous branch only for the severe stuff, everything else lands in the new release and you're frozen out.

What I'd do on your end: clone one of them to staging in October, flip PHP to 8.1, enable WP_DEBUG_LOG and click through checkout once. If Mollie 7.3.x throws deprecation notices you'll see them in the log straight away, and then you know whether the extension needs updating before anyone's customers do.

Not Friday though.

ivanvallejo

Which host are the two 7.4 shops on, Combell still? Because on most shared panels the PHP version is a dropdown next to the domain, you pick 8.1, it takes effect in a minute, and you can flip it back just as fast if the site goes white.

So the switch itself is nothing.

What bites is the stuff nobody tested. Old snippets in functions.php, a custom shipping thing some freelancer wrote in 2019, that kind of code.

How I do it on the coffee shop: staging copy, run PHP Compatibility Checker across the plugins and the theme, then I set display_errors = Off and log_errors = On in the staging php.ini and place one test order through the whole checkout with a real payment method in test mode.

I'd rather read 40 lines of deprecation warnings in a log than one angry customer email.

I'm not sure Mollie 7.3.x even passes the scan, to be fair.

tamara

I've no idea which version mine is on. My host is managed so I never got a dropdown like yours, and the panel just says "PHP" with nothing next to it.

Is it maybe in Site Health somewhere? It might be under Tools but I could be wrong.

MellowThistle0520

Site Health works, but WC > Status is quicker. Scroll down to Server environment and the PHP version is right there, it even goes orange when it thinks you're too old.

Changing it is another story. In your case the host has to do it, because managed usually means the dropdown exists but it's hidden on their side and you have to open a ticket, which took two days at Combell when we still had the old shop there.

Ask them before you update Woo though!

N3onc0m3t

"Most panels" is generous. I set up a new client account last month and the host had it on 7.4 by default, I had to go in and change it myself. Why does anyone still pay for that?

Cheers

Hidden_Panda

The switch is not "nothing", it is a treadmill. Every year their is new minimum, you move everything. You test everything and the next year same story again with 8.2 probably.

My club site is on home.pl and they just moved us to 8.1 in the spring, after I asked three times... So the two shops on 7.4 are not so strange. I wouldn't expect every host to be ready by February. It should be checked.

ivanvallejo

Hi @N3onc0m3t

I opened four new accounts this year, two on Hostinger and two on a smaller box, and every one of them came up on 8.2 or 8.3 without me touching anything. Which host put you on 7.4? I'd like to know, because that's rare now.

What I see is different. The new accounts are fine, it's the old ones that stay old, because the host never flips an existing account and the owner never clicks the button, so a 2021 account just sits on whatever it got in 2021.

The numbers on https://wordpress.org/about/stats/ say the same thing.

BraveWalrus

The extensions are the smaller worry, in my experience. I'm on 8.3 since spring on the TransIP box the previous builder left me and the only thing that broke was a snippet.

an old one in Code Snippets. Something to hide the shipping calculator on the cart page, written years before I got the site and on 8.3 it threw a fatal becuase of some deprecated function nobody had looked at since.

Took me a minute to find. Staging copy, switch PHP, load the cart page, white screen, go to Snippets, deactivate them one by one, found it.

Mollie itself was fine, Rank Math was fine. Woo was super fine.

So you'd have to go through the snippets and the little custom bits first not only the plugin list because that's where the dead code hides.

Can someone with a bigger shop confirm it was that easy for them too?

tamara

Found it, 8.0. It was orange like you said.

So I wrote to my host the same evening and they answered in an hour, not two days like yours.

They said they want to put me on 8.3 on a copy of the shop first and I try to place an order there.

Then they switch the real one. Sounds ok to me.

MellowThistle0520

Ok the four years bit landed. I was reading this as a Woo deadline and it isnt. The two shops on 7.4 have been a problem since before I even took them over and I only noticed because Woo now puts a date on it. That's on me.

So the plan changed. We cloned the first one to staging on Thursday, flipped it to 8.1 in the panel and ran a test order with Bancontact. Mollie 7.3.x didnt die, it only spat deprecation notices in the log so the update to the current Mollie went through on staging and checkout still works. The other one we do next week, same way. Both live before November not after.

The rest of the shops stay as they're until after Black Friday, they're on 8.2 and 8.3 and there's nothing for them to gain in the middle of the busiest weeks.

Where I still land: February itself isn't the scary part. Your log on staging approach was though. That one I'm keeping.

Atif

On my last PHP move, the pages were fine and the cron was not. You have to open Scheduled Actions after the switch and check the pending list actually drains - because nothing on the front end tells you it stopped.