Server requirements
To use any of our WordPress themes, we recommend your host supports WordPress 6 or greater, PHP 7.4 or greater version (WordPress is now recommending PHP 7.4, read more), and MySQL 5.7 or greater version. For detailed PHP extension recommendations, see the Hosting Handbook.
Important:
PHP version less than 7.3+ and MySQL version less than 5.6 no longer receive active support and many versions are at End Of Life and are therefore no longer maintained. As such, using outdated and unsupported versions of MySQL and PHP may expose your site to security vulnerabilities.
In most cases, you cannot update the PHP version yourself and need to contact your host about this. The upgrade process is an easy process and should be something your host can do for you without impacting your website or charging you a fee. Here’s a letter you can send to your host; copy and paste:
I'm interested in running WordPress on my website, and I was wondering if my account supported the following:
- PHP 7.4 or greater
- MySQL 5.7 or greater OR MariaDB 10.3 or greater
- Nginx or Apache with mod_rewrite module
- HTTPS support
Also, please increase these limits to a minimum as follows:
max_execution_time 240
memory_limit 512M
post_max_size 64M
upload_max_filesize 64M
max_input_time 120
Thank you!
PHP Configuration limits
Issues you may encounter, such as demo content fails when importing and similar issues, are generally related to excessively low PHP configuration limit settings. You can either increase these limits on your own or contact your web host and ask to have the limits increased to the following minimums:
- memory_limit 512M
- max_input_vars 5000
- max_execution_time 300
- max_input_time 120
- post_max_size 64M
- upload_max_filesize 64M
- allow_url_fopen ON
- asp_tags OFF
- cURL ON
