Show Script
This is Malcolm Peralty here from PressTitan and this is The WP Minute, Episode 122

Kinsta has found that WordPress 4.9.8 can handle more requests per second than WordPress 5.0 and have said that they aren’t surprised by that result because the entire WordPress 5.0 project has been rushed.

Other than this finding, they go over how different versions of PHP offer different abilities to handle traffic on a site and have a very wide testing setup, which I really appreciate, including testing with WooCommerce. We don’t allow sites to run on PHP 5 dot anything on PressTitan because we knew it was slower than PHP 7 and it is rare that we run into any incompatibility issues these days, but to see how much of a difference there is between PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0 was astounding.

According to WPTavern, the 5.0.2 release of WordPress will come with some major performance improvements and is due to be released on December 19th. I still don’t think we will recommend upgrading to any WordPress 5 release until sometime in the middle of January, just so we give core, plugin, and theme developers enough time to catch up after the holidays so that our upgrades go as smooth as possible.

I will say that I’ve been pretty happy with some of my staging upgrade tests with only a few missteps and typically with plugins that haven’t been updated in half a year or more.

For those of you that are waiting for the 5.1 release of WordPress, you’ll likely only have to wait until the end of February with a proposed release date of February 21st.

That’s it for today’s WP Minute, thank you all for watching.

Sources:
WordPress Benchmarks with Different PHP versions
WordPress 5.0.2 and 5.1 Release Dates

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