Web Experts has been running into this more and more lately. A surprising number of businesses are still hosted on outdated PHP versions, most commonly PHP 7.4, and at this point it is no longer just a nice-to-upgrade situation.
PHP 7.4 has been officially discontinued by the PHP development team. WordPress no longer supports it, many modern plugins already require PHP 8.x, and newer versions of WordPress core are becoming increasingly unstable on older environments.
What We Are Actually Seeing
The impacts are not theoretical. Plugin updates fail or refuse to install, performance gets sluggish, and errors show up that nobody can explain by looking at the site itself. The cause is sitting one layer down in the hosting environment.
There is also the security side. Unsupported software does not get patched, which means the risk quietly increases every month the site stays where it is. In the worst cases, an entire site gets blocked from future updates, which is a hard place to be when something breaks and the only fix is an update you cannot install.
The Order Matters
PHP needs to be upgraded first. Once the environment is current, WordPress core, plugins, and themes can be safely updated on top of it. Doing this in the other order is how sites end up half-broken with nobody sure which change caused it.
In most cases, current plugins already support PHP 8.1 or 8.2. The exception is a site that relies on abandoned extensions, and that is worth knowing about before the upgrade rather than during it.
Hosting Is Not Just Infrastructure
It is easy to think of hosting as the boring part, the thing you pay for once and forget. In practice it directly affects security, stability, and whether a website can keep evolving at all. A site stuck on an old PHP version is a site that has stopped being able to move.
This is one of those invisible issues that quietly turns into an emergency if ignored. Nothing looks wrong until the day something does, and by then the options are narrower and more expensive.
If You Are Not Sure
Plenty of business owners genuinely do not know what PHP version their site is running, and there is no reason they should. It is not something that appears in the WordPress dashboard for most people, and no hosting company sends a friendly reminder.
Web Experts can assist with checking and with upgrading safely. We routinely review hosting environments and handle upgrades in a controlled way so nothing breaks.