ChatGPT: WordPress 7.4 EOL (End of Life) Situation Question

I could not find any definitive, official WordPress core announcement stating exactly why they only began showing “PHP 7.4 is outdated” warnings in July 2025 (rather than earlier). But I found several clues and plausible reasoning based on WordPress’s development practices, Site Health tool history, and version adoption thresholds. You can use these ideas in your article (with caveats) unless/until WordPress publishes a clear “why.”

Clues & Context

1. “PHP 8 Support Clarification” post in WordPress Core
   In April 2025, WordPress published a post titled “PHP 8 support clarification” that mentions usage of PHP 8.3 or higher is at 8.9% (as of that time). Make WordPress
   That post suggests WordPress tracks adoption thresholds before making big changes in how strongly they “endorse” or require new versions.

2. WordPress’s official “Requirements” page now recommends PHP 8.3 or greater
   On WordPress.org’s Requirements page, “PHP version 8.3 or greater” is now listed as recommended. WordPress.org
   That indicates WordPress is evolving its baseline expectations, not just the absolute minimum.

3. Site Health tool’s evolution and “minimum version bump” mechanism
   The Site Health system was designed to allow WordPress to raise the minimum version required (or recommended) gradually, and to warn users when their version is beneath that threshold. WordPress Consultant: Judith Kallos
   In practice, WordPress has been cautious about “pushing” newer PHP versions until a critical mass of sites and plugins support them reliably.

4. Backward compatibility, plugin ecosystem, and risk tolerance
   WordPress must balance pushing forward with ensuring that a large ecosystem of themes, plugins, and custom code don’t break in mass. The warning for PHP 7.4 may reflect that WordPress has judged 8.3 (or a close successor) is now stable enough in the ecosystem to elevate the recommendation.

5. Historic proposals for a schedule of version drops
   In 2020, there was a proposal in WordPress core to adopt a fixed schedule for dropping old PHP versions over time. Make WordPress That suggests the architecture is already contemplating version deprecation in planned phases rather than abrupt jumps.

Hypothesis: Why only 7.4 got the warning now

Putting the pieces together, here’s a plausible narrative:

• WordPress (and the larger WP community) has been waiting until a certain adoption threshold of PHP 8.x to be met before raising a more visible alert.

• Once PHP 8.3 reached a sufficient share of active sites (or once compatibility edge cases were resolved), WordPress felt confident in shifting the recommended version upward and warning older versions more assertively.

• Because PHP 7.4 had already been EOL (end-of-life) for a while, it was a natural candidate for the “first to warn” as the lowest unsupported version still widely in use.

• Upgrading minimum recommended versions too aggressively risks breaking a lot of sites, so WordPress likely delayed until the plugin/theme ecosystem had matured around newer PHP versions.

Thus, WordPress may have delayed showing a hard “your version is outdated” banner until the risk of disruption was lower and the community was more prepared.

If you like, I can dig further (especially through WordPress Trac, core tickets, or commit logs) and see if there is a commit or ticket that triggers the July 2025 activation of that warning. Do you want me to do that?