For anyone who listened to the State of the Word talk during WordCamp US 2016 or has recently ventured over to check out the latest WordPress hosting requirements, it is obvious that WordPress is encouraging the use of PHP 7.

Of course, with so many plugins available for  WordPress, how do we know if our sites are PHP 7 ready?  Fortunately, WP Engine has released a plugin that checks themes and other plugins for PHP 7 compatibility. The plugin does a nice job of running through each plugin to determine status. The only issue I ran into are that some plugins are too large to process.

I used the compatibility plugin on my site and it found one plugin that was not PHP 7 ready.   The non-compliant plugin was an older SEO meta tag plugin that I was planning on replacing. This was the push I needed to replace that older plugin so I installed  the Yoast SEO plugin as a replacement.

Once my site was deemed ready by the PHP 7 compatibility checker, I contacted support at WP Engine and asked them to upgrade my site to a server with PHP 7 support. The process went smoothly and my site was running on PHP 7 within a few minutes.

I definitely noticed a performance improvement once my site had been upgraded to PHP 7 and am very pleased that I updated my site.