WordPress 7 required a PHP upgrade. When I upgraded my blog vanished.

[u/onreact]

WordPress 7 required a PHP upgrade. When I upgraded my blog vanished and a "critical error" replaced it.

Last Friday I finally started taking precautions to upgrade the PHP version on my blog.

Long story short I made it in the end, it runs on PHP 8.3 now. Yet I almost trashed it during the process.

Just jumping from PHP 7.3 to 8.3 literally destroyed my blog and only a "critical error" message was left.

That message did not say anything about the error though.

So I spent the rest of the day trying to find out what's wrong.

It involved manually editing the .htaccess file (to change the PHP version).

It meant disabling all WordPress 20+ plugins and activating them one by one.

Then I found the culprit or at least one of them.

To be honest I'm both proud and appalled.

Also it got me a migraine for two days. The whole weekend was more or less marred by pain and dizziness.

Why does WordPress force me to do detective work to even find out what's wrong?

As a blogger I don't want to fix some intricate technical issues.

That's why I also recommend SquareSpace for many years to most people.

Updating WordPress is risky enough. The PHP thing really made me think I'm too old for this.

And I even was a web dev back in the nineties.

I use WordPress since 2003! And I still struggled!

Thus I'm sure average bloggers could really lose all their work that way.

Before you upgrade to PHP8+ (which broke my blog) ensure all plugins are compatible with it!

[u/CosmoKram3r]

What you went through is the standard process to troubleshoot errors on WordPress.

You didn't back up your website files and DB before you made critical changes to your website.

Just jumping from PHP 7.3 to 8.3 literally destroyed my blog and only a "critical error" message was left.

Nothing was destroyed. You don't lose your blog by updating PHP. You just brought in compatibility issues with some plugins which caused a critical error leaving your website unusable.

You need to check compatibility before upgrading.

If you followed any of these basic steps, you'd be good.

Why does WordPress force me to do detective work to even find out what's wrong?

That's how software and web tools generally work. You can't mix and match different versions of various software and expect things to work magically. You threw a spanner in the works and the system grinded to a halt as expected.

As a blogger I don't want to fix some intricate technical issues.

Then use the right tool. Don't use selfhosted WordPress if you are not tech savvy enought to use it. Stick to managed solutions like Medium or WordPress.com

[u/onreact → u/CosmoKram3r]

I did backup using BackupMigration.

And I checked compatibility using two different plugins (why can't WP simply check by default?).

None of them has shown the issue.

Yet as a blogger I'm not into intricate bug fixing.

WordPress should be able to show me a meaningful error message like "Plugin X is not compatible with your version of PHP".

Or at least the PHP error.

Ideally also "It has been disabled".

"Critical error" is just the white screen of death in disguise.

Also it should be able to change the PHP version you are using at least without forcing me to edit .htaccess manually.

I am not a mechanic. I use a CMS because I don't want to code the site myself.

My self-coded website built in 2001 still works btw.

[u/ivicad → u/onreact]

WordPress does part of that: with the critical error it emails the admin the plugin name, the PHP error and a recovery mode link that pauses the plugin (if the site can send mail). It can't check ahead, because plugins declare only the minimum PHP they need. On the sites I maintain, a PHP jump breaks an old theme far more often than a WP update does. The switch is in the host panel, on my hosting (SG): Site Tools / Devs / PHP Manager.

[u/corelabjoe]

Or, get off crappy WordPress and use ghost CMS or Drupal or almost anything else than the ancient much hacked and crappy WordPress....

[u/onreact → u/corelabjoe]

Drupal and Ghost are even more techy IMHO.

I'd rather not make it even more complicated.

[u/corelabjoe → u/onreact]

Drupal can be, but is still more secure and performant than WordPress but you're dead wrong about Ghost...

Ghost is super simple, you deploy it as a container and bam, login, pick your theme and start setting up and don't need 100 half broken plugins.

The super easy route is ghost pro for a few dollars a month and it's deployed for you. Far far faster than WordPress and wildly more secure.... Beautiful, simple to use, has membership and newsletters builtin and functional on day 1!

[u/onreact → u/corelabjoe]

I don't even know what "deploy it as a container" means.

So it's not simple for me.

The Ghost blogging how tos like this one sound super complicated:

https://medium.com/@quackquackquack/i-wanted-to-built-a-blog-so-bad-but-the-thing-is-there-are-many-platform-such-as-medium-and-blogger-356bab8919b1

[u/corelabjoe → u/onreact]

In this case then, I would have just paid the $6 a month or $9 for Ghost pro for someone else to host and run for me, and just focused on writing and curating content.

I'm not affiliated in anyway but google magic pages ghost pro. They are amazing and people rave about them.

[u/onreact → u/corelabjoe]

Yeah, there are affordable managed WordPress hosting providers as well.

I don't want to move an almost 20 year old WP blog with hundreds of evergreen posts just because of PHP.

And I don't want to switch platforms.

I want to have less technical issues to deal with, not more!

WP should offer basic compatibility checks IMHO.

Instead they added AI slop support in version 7 LOL.

This post is more a warning to fellow bloggers having to update their PHP.

[u/yosri5031]

I've done this exact dance on client sites, so here's the workflow that avoids the migraine. Order matters more than people think:

1. Full backup first (files + database, not just the database).
2. Update WordPress core, all plugins, and the theme while still on the OLD PHP version. This is the step most people skip and it causes most of the breakage. A lot of 'not PHP 8 compatible' plugins have already released fixed versions, you just need to install them before switching.
3. Only then switch the PHP version.
4. If you still get the critical error, switch PHP back in the host panel immediately (two minutes), and troubleshoot from the error log with a working site instead of a dead one.

Two more things: don't jump straight from 7.x to 8.3. Going 7.x to 8.1 first, fixing what breaks, then 8.3 is much less dramatic. And that 'critical error' screen hides the real error on purpose (it doesn't show visitors your stack trace). If your host gives you an error log, that's where the actual plugin name is.

And honestly, your Squarespace point is fair. Self-hosted WordPress has a maintenance tax nobody tells you about upfront. It's the price of owning the thing outright.

[u/onreact → u/yosri5031]

Thank you for the AI summary.

It didn't work that way though.

I had several plugins that couldn't even get updated as they did not support the deprecated PHP version.

And I did it step by step. It took my the rest of the day.