I was pleasantly surprised to see that the updated WordPress.org stats page shows more than 50% of active sites are on version 4.0 or newer:
That is really good for a piece of software released less than seven months ago. The years long effort into making upgrades easier and more reliable are paying off nicely.
When I looked at PHP and MySQL version usage that is where things got strange. I know that PHP upgrades at some hosting providers happen at a very slow pace, but I didn’t fully appreciate how slow.
The most reported MySQL version for active WordPress sites is 5.5, at nearly 60%. The first MySQL 5.5 General Availability release was two years ago ( February 2013 ). Considering how sensitive data storage is I’d consider that a good upgrade rate.
Turns out to be significantly faster than PHP.
Less than 47% of active WordPress sites report using PHP version 5.4 or newer.
The first release of PHP 5.4 was three years ago ( March 2012 ). I could see not wanting to upgrade on the initial release, so I’ll discount that to two years with PHP 5.4.13 in March 2013. That still leaves PHP 5.4+ at 47% compared to MySQL 5.5+ at 66%.
I didn’t expect to see hosting providers upgrading MySQL faster than PHP.