How Do I Upgrade PHP without Downtime?

  • I am not sure what section of the forum to post this but I’m all turned around.

    My WP Host (siteground) just notified me that my WP Membership site that runs on PHP 5.x is deprecated and that I need to upgrade to PHP 7.x.

    They also listed my plugins that are not compatible with PHP 7.x and it happens that the plugin IS MY MEMBERSHIP PLUGIN!

    My site would DIE if upgraded to PHP 7.x and my customers/members would lose access to their paid content. This is not an option.

    I know that I have to build a new membership site as I am going to use a new Membership plugin once I decide which one (that does not have a yearly fee!) and is PHP 7.x compatible.

    Thing is, I’m going to need to build this WP site while my old current one continues to serve my members, but I don’t know the steps to take and how I can do this using the same domain name?

    How is this usually done where you want to keep your current WP site working, but you need to build a replacement WP site that will be using the same domain name?

    Help would be appreciated. ??

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  • I would ask at your plugin’s support forum for fixes so it is PHP 7 compatible. It shouldn’t be very difficult for the author to fix. There is a plugin called PHP Compatibility Checker which gives all the lines of code that are not compatible.
    If you still want to switch to a different membership plugin, you can test them on your computer (install WordPress locally) or on a sandbox like https://poopy.life/
    There should be an easy conversion between plugins that do the same thing. You shouldn’t have to build a new site. At the worst, you would have to export the data (use a plugin for exporting to CSV), massage the data (rearrange it), import it back. You can test this by exporting and loading it into a sandbox with a different membership plugin installed.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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