Does the older version PHP affects search engine ranking?

Hi,
Folks,
I am having concern with my website: https://www.swatirecipe.com/
That has a great amount of traffic till the last month but I can see a drastic change in search engine traffic and ranking and I am really pissed off, you see.

My website is runningon PHP 5 version, however I heard currently there is PHP 7.0+ is running. Does use of old PHP version hitting my website traffic and am i able to update it from user's end.
Please help!!!

 

I don't think so. PHP is server side script, client knows nothing about server side, they can see only HTML, that was returned by server. So, Googlebot can not identify PHP version if only in the HTML there is some meta tag which contains such information. I don't think the traffic drop is related to PHP version, but if you can switch to newer PHP, do it.

 

Thanks mate for helping me out. I am gonna investigate the other causes. Thanks again!

 

I have found WordPress version in the html. You can hide it, but I do not think it can affect the website ranking.
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 5.3">

 

The PHP version might be available in the response header. Often servers add the "server" header but often it will simply say "Apache" or "LiteSpeed" but sometimes you can see the php version as well.

I agree that the version does not affect the ranking directly. However the newer versions of php perform better and can speed up your website and I do believe website speed is one of the ranking factors ... but how much that would affect the ranking is questionable.

 

There have been several algorithm updates. Many webmasters have reported losing traffic.

 

PHP 7 has a jit and should be far faster. But if you have your caching plugins set up correctly it will probably be a small difference.

 

Really the PHP version should have little to do with your worries. Whist there are legitimate concerns in having outdated versions, those are more about speed and security than SEO.

What is troubling on your pages is the lack of accessibility caused by the design, and the lack of semantics because, well... to put it as plainly and bluntly as possible, it's the steaming pile of developer incompetence and ineptitude that is turdpress.

You've got absurdly undersized "fixed metric" (aka pixel measured) font sizes, illegible colour contrasts on areas like the white text on green or the grey on grey footer, where your social icons should be you've got empty dark-green circles, etc, etc.

Under the hood again, turdpress which seems to be squeezing out some bootcrap. Hence it's knee-deep in "semantic markup, what's that" and massive bloat. Bloat like the 44k of markup to deliver 6k of plaintext and 7 content images; not even 12k of HTML's flipping job. Static scripting in the markup, static style in the markup, presentational use of classes, endless pointless DIV for nothing, endless pointless SPAN for nothing... it's a laundry list of how NOT to write HTML... Though entirely par for the course for "when bootcrap met turdpress".

This is only further exacerbated by the ridiculous 650k of CSS and 2.35 MEGABYTES of JavaScript on a site that likely doens't warrant more than 32k of CSS and 5k of scripting... The total page size of the home page coming to 3.34 megabytes in 128 files for a page that probably doesn't warrant 256k in 20 files? Well, it's got problems!

You mix the lack of semantics with the massive code bloat, and it's no wonder it's likely getting pimp-slapped clear off of search. The entire methodology by which the site was built might have "felt" easy, but the choices made are all guaranteed to get it de-listed on search sooner than later... and to make it vulnerable to massive ranking changes the moment there's an algo update.

... and being there's been a major Google algo update, there's a reason sites built in ignorance with TP and BS have their owners running around like chickens with their heads cut off over ranking changes. There is a reason I call people who try to tell others to use Wordpress for business little more than snake oil peddlers, and those who use bootstrap for front-end development outright frauds unqualified to do a damned thing in web development.

Sites like yours being a stunning example of WHY. I would suggest junking it and starting over as whoever told you that was how to build a website flat out bamboozled you.

 

You saw a dip in traffic so you assume maybe it's the version of your php that caused it?
All you need to do is check your web sites statistics. Most web stats will report where your traffic is coming from. If your traffic is coming from SEARCH then check to see if there's a decrease in Google referers. If so then you were most likely impacted by Google's change in algorithm. Generally your content will have a direct impact on traffic. You can make all the changes in your code like deathshadow suggested but I HIGHLY doubt that google is punishing you because your HTML code isn't written how deathshadow would write it (seriously hahaha). When I visit your web site I see the content is mixed with English and something I can't decipher. If I was to take a guess Google most likely isn't going to display a language mixed page to a English traffic base. I've attached the screenshot.. Fix this and I'm sure you will start to see more traffic.

 

It's Hindi.

... and you're on to something there too, the page is filled mostly with Hindi, but has English mixed in with the only LANG attributes on the page being lang="en-US". I'm pretty sure the primary language of said site is NOT American English. It needs the document lang changed to lang="hi" and then lang="en" applied to span or the appropriate semantic tags around the english that's mixed in.

Hence this:

<div id="weekly_special-2" class="widget col-lg-4 col-md-6 nostylewt widget_weekly_special clearfix"><h2 class="w-bot-border entry-title"><span>Weekly</span> Special</h2><div class="img-box for-all"> <a href="https://www.swatirecipe.com/recipe/cauliflower-paratha-recipe-gobhi-paratha-recipe-in-hindi/"><img width="122" height="132" src="https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/q_glossy,ret_img,w_122,h_132/https://www.swatirecipe.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Gobhi-paratha-recipe-in-Hindi-122x132.jpg" class="attachment-weekly-special-thumb size-weekly-special-thumb wp-post-image" alt="Gobhi paratha recipe in Hindi" /></a></div><div class="for-res"> <a href="https://www.swatirecipe.com/recipe/cauliflower-paratha-recipe-gobhi-paratha-recipe-in-hindi/"><img width="251" height="132" src="https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/q_glossy,ret_img,w_251,h_132/https://www.swatirecipe.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Gobhi-paratha-recipe-in-Hindi-251x132.jpg" class="attachment-weekly-for-res size-weekly-for-res wp-post-image" alt="Gobhi paratha recipe in Hindi" /></a></div><h4 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.swatirecipe.com/recipe/cauliflower-paratha-recipe-gobhi-paratha-recipe-in-hindi/">गोभी के पराठे बनाने की सबसे स्वादिष्ट रेसिपी सीखें</a></h4><p>Cauliflower paratha recipe: Gobhi paratha recipe in Hindi &nbsp; गोभी के पराठे जिसे Cauliflower paratha recipe भी कहा जाता है का...<a href="https://www.swatirecipe.com/recipe/cauliflower-paratha-recipe-gobhi-paratha-recipe-in-hindi/"> more</a></p> <a href="https://www.swatirecipe.com/recipe/cauliflower-paratha-recipe-gobhi-paratha-recipe-in-hindi/" class="readmore">Read More</a></div>

Code (markup):

Would more appropriately have been coded thus:

<!-- assumes HTML is set to lang="hi" -->
<div class="weekly_special">
	<h2 lang="en"><span>Weekly</span> Special</h2>
	<div>
		<a href="/recipe/cauliflower-paratha-recipe-gobhi-paratha-recipe-in-hindi/">
			<picture>
				<source
					media="(min-width:640px)"
					srcset="https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/q_glossy,ret_img,w_251,h_132/https://www.swatirecipe.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Gobhi-paratha-recipe-in-Hindi-251x132.jpg"
				>
				<img
					src="https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/q_glossy,ret_img,w_122,h_132/https://www.swatirecipe.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Gobhi-paratha-recipe-in-Hindi-122x132.jpg"
					class="leadingPlate"
				>
			</picture>
			<h3>
				<a href="/recipe/cauliflower-paratha-recipe-gobhi-paratha-recipe-in-hindi/">
					गोभी के पराठे बनाने की सबसे स्वादिष्ट रेसिपी सीखें
				</a>
			</h4>
				<p>
					<span lang="en">Cauliflower paratha recipe: Gobhi paratha recipe in Hindi</span> &nbsp; गोभी के पराठे जिसे <span lang="en">Cauliflower paratha recipe</span> भी कहा जाता है का..
				</p>
				<a
					href="/recipe/cauliflower-paratha-recipe-gobhi-paratha-recipe-in-hindi/"
					class="readmore"
				>Read More</a>
		</div>

Code (markup):

Applying the language as appropriate, ditching the endless pointless classes for nothing, and fixing the broken heading depth that could result in search ignoring the enclosed text. Pretty sure Baidu would tell that to kiss off, being non-English both Baidu and Yandex would be far more important than Google.

Reducing the total code size by a third just being icing on the cake, though good luck convincing turdpress of that.

Anywho, mixed language is a thing and the mechanism exists in HTML to do it... it's just a matter of DOING IT!