The WordPress Update That Will Actually Break Your Site
Key takeaways:
- WordPress 7.0 ends support for PHP 7.2 and 7.3, meaning any site still running those versions will face compatibility failures when the update lands.
- Real-time collaborative editing is the headline feature, and for marketing teams of three or more people, it genuinely changes how content workflows operate inside WordPress.
- The AI Connector moves AI integration from third-party plugin territory into WordPress core infrastructure, which has long-term implications for how sites are built and maintained.
Every major WordPress release has a boring requirement hiding inside it
The exciting stuff always gets the attention. New editor features, new blocks, new integrations. People screenshot the shiny things and post about them. The thing that actually breaks their client’s site at 9am on a Tuesday gets less coverage.
WordPress 7.0 Release Candidate 1 dropped in late March 2025. The full release is targeting April 9 at WordCamp Asia. The headline features are genuinely interesting this time, more so than a lot of recent releases. But the thing that will cause the most damage between now and end of year is a three-line note buried in the compatibility docs: PHP 7.2 and 7.3 support ends with this release.
I have been doing this since 1998. The pattern never changes. Exciting features arrive, everyone talks about them, and then a few weeks later I get a call from someone whose site stopped working because they missed the boring compatibility requirement.
What does real-time collaborative editing actually change?
For most small business sites, almost nothing. If you have one person managing your WordPress content, real-time collaboration is not a feature you will ever notice.
For teams of three or more people working inside the same WordPress install, it changes the workflow significantly. The classic problem has always been the locked page: someone starts editing a post or page, forgets to close it, and everyone else either gets a warning message or unknowingly overwrites what the first person was doing. Agencies have developed all sorts of workarounds for this over the years. We used to tell clients to use a shared spreadsheet to flag which pages were being actively edited. That is not a great solution, but it worked well enough for a long time.
What WordPress 7.0 introduces is Google Docs-style simultaneous editing. Multiple people on the same page at the same time, seeing each other’s changes in real time. The implications go beyond convenience. It also removes the staging-to-production copy problem that teams run into when two people are editing in different environments and then have to reconcile their changes manually.
I had a client earlier this year, a Singapore-based consumer brand with a marketing team of five, where the content bottleneck was almost entirely caused by this problem. Two editors, one staging environment, changes getting lost in the merge. That is a solved problem with 7.0. For organisations at that scale, this is a meaningful operational change.
For everyone else, it is a feature that will sit there doing nothing, which is fine.
What is the AI Connector and should you care about it now?
The AI Connector is a standardised PHP library for connecting WordPress to AI services. It is still early. Do not build a business process around it yet.
What matters about it is the direction it signals. Right now, AI integration in WordPress is almost entirely handled at the plugin layer. You install a plugin from a third-party developer, that plugin connects to whatever AI service it was built for, and you hope the plugin author keeps it updated and does not abandon it. That is a fragile architecture for something that is increasingly central to how content gets created and reviewed.
Moving AI integration into WordPress core infrastructure means the connection layer becomes standardised and maintained by the same people maintaining WordPress itself. That changes the reliability profile significantly over time. It also means plugin developers can build against a consistent interface rather than each one rolling their own connection logic.
The practical implication for 2025 is limited. The practical implication over the next two to three years is that AI tooling inside WordPress becomes more stable and more predictable, which matters if you are planning a serious content operation on the platform.
For Q2 planning this year, the AI Connector is worth knowing about. It is not worth restructuring anything for yet.
Why does PHP version matter and how do you check yours?
PHP is the programming language that runs WordPress. Every WordPress site runs on a server with a specific PHP version installed. WordPress, themes, and plugins are all written to work with certain PHP versions, and when that range changes, things break.
PHP 7.2 reached end of official support in November 2020. PHP 7.3 reached end of life in December 2021. Both have been on borrowed time for years. WordPress has continued to support them for longer than many expected, partly because a significant portion of the install base was still running them.
With WordPress 7.0, that runway ends. Sites running PHP 7.2 or 7.3 that update to WordPress 7.0 will encounter compatibility failures. The severity depends on what themes and plugins are installed, but the failure modes range from broken functionality to the site going white-screen entirely.
To check your PHP version: log in to your WordPress dashboard, go to Tools, then Site Health, then the Info tab. PHP version is listed under the Server section. If you are running anything below 8.0, you should be talking to your host or developer now. PHP 8.2 is the current stable recommendation. PHP 8.3 is available from most managed hosting providers.
The upgrade itself is usually not complicated if your themes and plugins are reasonably up to date. The complication arises when sites have been sitting unchanged for two or three years with plugins that have not been maintained. Those plugins may not be compatible with PHP 8.x, which means a PHP upgrade can surface a separate set of problems. Better to find that out before a WordPress major version forces the issue.
Which sites are most at risk from this update?
Sites that have not been actively maintained. That is the consistent pattern across every major compatibility change I have seen over 25 years.
The specific profile I see most often: a business built a WordPress site three or four years ago, everything worked, so they left it alone. No updates, no maintenance plan, no one keeping an eye on the underlying software. The site looks fine on the surface. The PHP version is from whenever the site was last touched. Plugins are two or three major versions behind.
At Chillybin we have a standard maintenance audit we run on new client sites before doing any development work, and the PHP version check is one of the first things on the list. Earlier this year we picked up a client who had been running PHP 7.2 on a WooCommerce store since 2021. The site had been generating revenue the entire time. It had also been accumulating security exposure the entire time, and it would have been one WordPress major update away from breaking completely.
The audit took about two hours. The PHP migration took half a day. The alternative would have been an emergency call after the site went down.
Sites built on budget shared hosting are also more exposed than sites on managed WordPress hosting. Managed hosts like Kinsta, WP Engine, and Cloudways typically flag outdated PHP versions and in some cases will prompt or auto-migrate. Shared hosting providers vary significantly. Some have excellent tooling for this. Others will let your site sit on PHP 7.1 indefinitely unless you specifically ask to change it.
What should you actually do before WordPress 7.0 lands?
Three things, in order.
Check your PHP version using the Site Health tool described above. If you are on 8.0 or above, you are in a reasonable position. If you are on 7.4, you are out of support but likely safe for now. If you are on 7.2 or 7.3, treat this as urgent.
Run a plugin and theme compatibility check. Most quality plugin authors have updated their code for PHP 8.x. Some have not. The easiest way to check is to use the PHP Compatibility Checker plugin, which scans your installed plugins and themes against a target PHP version and flags anything that will break. Run it against PHP 8.1 or 8.2 before you touch anything on the server.
Upgrade in a staging environment first. Do not upgrade PHP on a live site without testing. Spin up a staging copy, upgrade PHP, check everything. If something breaks, you find out in staging rather than in front of customers. If your host does not provide a staging environment, that is a separate problem worth solving.
The whole process, for a well-maintained site, should take a few hours. For a site that has been left alone for three years, it may take longer. But the window is there. April 9 is the target release date. There is time to do this properly.
Every major platform update comes with two stories. The feature story gets told on tech blogs and in launch announcements. The compatibility story gets told later, quietly, when someone’s site breaks and they are trying to figure out why.
The real-time collaboration in WordPress 7.0 is a genuine improvement. The AI Connector is pointing in the right direction. Both of those things are worth knowing about.
The PHP compatibility requirement is the one worth acting on. The sites that get damaged by this update will not be the ones that ignored the new features. They will be the ones that never got around to checking what version of PHP they were running.
