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I have a client whose theme has not been updated to support PHP 8.
The theme was last updated on May 17, 2022, and when I try to update to PHP 8 the site crashes.
Do I suggest a new theme?
Do I rebuild the site?
Do I fix the PHP manually?
It’s definitely the theme and the corresponding plugin that it works with….
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Tricky one.
PHP 8 support for plugins is improving but it’s patchy outside major developers in my experience.
Depending on the site and how it’s built then changing theme might not be as bad as it sounds. For example, a WP Bakery or Gutenberg site in different themes will pretty much be alright content wise, it will be the header/footer/widgets that may need tinkering with. Moving to an all in one theme like Divi/Total/BeTheme might need more changes. Switching themes doesn’t carry Customizer settings over.
I don’t have any qualms about keeping a client on PHP v7.4 for the time being, until either their site is rebuilt or the theme/plugin/some custom crap code from a 3rd party developer (number of times that’s happened!) is fixed.
With a theme, you can make a child theme and patch whatever issues you need. You can reach out to the developer and see if they will patch it themselves. Alternatively, if you don’t think there are any more updates to the theme, you can just patch the theme directly. The error log will guide you and from my experience it may even just be a single change. Often patching is much quicker than rebuilding the site and make the client happier. But after it’s patched I would let them know they are on borrowed time and should migrate to something supported.
From your point of view, it depends. Put a time vs money, pros vs cons of each approach and talk to the client.
One time i had the same issue.. it was 1 line of code in the them missing an opening php tag
<? some code
vs
<?php some code
took longer to parse the error logs than to fix