How to change PHP version

The theme I use supports PHP 5.6 and I need to upgrade my website to this version. Can you help me please?

Hi and welcome to the forum!

PHP version changing isn’t available on free hosting. Also, the version of PHP free hosting uses is 8.2 and we don’t want to downgrade to the version your theme requires as any PHP change will be applied server-level and that version is years outdated now, so you’ll be better off contacting your theme developer for any upgrade of its code so that it supports it or finding something else that also supports PHP 8.2 and has the same functionality (if not less) that the theme you were installing had.

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Free hosting only comes with one, up to date PHP version, which is currently PHP 8.2.

PHP 5.6 stopped receiving security updates over 6 years ago, and we cannot run unsafe code on our servers. If your website only works with PHP 5.6, it’s safe to assume that it’s also severely outdated, unmaintained, and contains many security vulnerabilities. Which, again, we don’t want on our servers.

The best thing to do is to update your website to work with PHP 8.2, or to replace the outdated theme with something that’s still being maintained.

Alternatively, premium hosting has additional measures so it can safely run older PHP versions, so on premium hosting, you can configure your account to run on PHP 5.6. However, again, that should only be used as a stop-gap measure, as you’ll still be running outdated, unsafe software with all the risks that it brings.

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