Magento 1 on PHP 7.4

Magento 1 reached End of Life on 30 June 2020, but it’s still in use. A lot of e-commerce companies don’t have a budget for migration. Since Magento 2 doesn’t offer better performance than the old good Magento 1, the decision to migrate is not easy.

Last supported by Magento 1 PHP version is PHP 7.2. Suddenly PHP 7.2 reached End of Life on 30 November 2020. So our platform doesn’t have security support and other improvements.

So we need to make something with this. The first thing that shouldn’t be difficult is upgrading the PHP version. I upgraded one Magento 1 store to PHP 7.4. It runs in production for a few months now and everything is fine. The store has better performance and security updates.

 

How I update Magento 1 store to PHP 7.4?

First, in my local environment, I checked if the store is working fine on PHP 7.2 to have a proper base for updating. Then I changed the PHP version in the webserver configuration. I started to test every functionality of Magento and third-party modules. Some errors gave 500 HTTP, some only were logged in Magento logs. So I checked logs and started fixing issues according to logs. To be honest Magento core works fine with PHP 7.4 there aren’t many things to fix.

Check PHP changelog, look what function was changed since PHP 7.2, and updated the code. For sure you will see a lot of deprecated features that should be replaced. In PHP documentation you will find migrating from version to version guidelines, read this to make your list of things you will need to check in your code.

After local code improvements push your code to some staging, pre-production environment. Test the store once again to make sure if everything is working fine. Then deploy on production šŸ™‚

I hope I inspire you to update your Magento 1 store to PHP 7.4. Better performance and security are waiting. In my case, after migration to PHP 7.4, server response time was reduced by 25% on all kinds of pages.

2 Comments

  1. Justin said:

    Hello Mateusz,
    I sent you an email through your contact form on your website, but I’m not sure if it went through. I am looking to hire a developer to help us keep our Magento 1 store operating when our hosting provider upgrades our PHP version to 7.4 from 5.6 next week. Please get in touch with me as soon as possible if this is a project you can help us with. Thank you!

    March 31, 2022
    Reply

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