#43
Lukas Novak
WP Taverm Jukebox with Alex Harlan
Episode
#43 – Lukas Novak on the Risks of Legacy PHP in WordPress
Outdated PHP is still sitting under a shocking number of WordPress sites. Lukas Novak explains the security and performance cost, and why “the plugin isn’t ready” is a weaker excuse every year.
by Alex Harlan·July 15, 2026·with Lukas Novak
Listen
Search for WP Taverm in your podcast player, or copy the feed URL:
https://wptaverm.com/feed/podcast/Lukas Novak lives where WordPress meets the runtime. He sees sites still on PHP versions that the language itself has already walked away from, usually because a dusty plugin or a scared maintainer froze the stack.
We talk through the real risks: unpatched interpreter bugs, missing performance wins, and the quiet way old PHP keeps you off modern WordPress APIs. Lukas is sympathetic to agencies stuck with inherited code. He is less sympathetic to hosts that make upgrades feel like a cliff.
The practical path is staging, a plugin audit, and a PHP bump with a rollback. Most sites survive. The ones that don’t were already one forgotten library away from a worse Monday.
If you manage WordPress for other people, this is a reminder that “it still loads” is not a security posture.
