Central to the changes is new functionality for the breadcrumb navigation component of the menu. In addition, we are providing more elbow room up there by using a simple magnifying glass icon to launch the Jump to or search feature instead of the former full-sized search box.

In the image below, we’ve highlighted the elements that have changed in this navigation update:

Numbered 1 through 5 are entries in the breadcrumb navigation for a typical WordPress site, which now provides targeted search and other capabilities at each level.

1. “Home” icon
2. Current company
3. All WordPress sites (behind the WordPress icon)
4. Current WordPress site
5. Current environment

And then the icon to launch the dashboard-wide Jump to or search feature:

6. Magnifying glass

The example above shows the path to a Live WordPress environment, but the breadcrumb navigation can also lead to instances of Kinsta’s Application, Database, and Static Site hosting services.

New capabilities for the breadcrumb navigation

Let’s take a closer look at what you’ll find under the new breadcrumb navigation.

Starting at the left, clicking on the “Home” icon will return you to the company Dashboard. (That’s the same as clicking the Kinsta logo in the upper-left of any MyKinsta page, but this icon makes that purpose clearer.)

Next is the name of the currently active Company. Clicking it activates a drop-down menu that allows you to quickly switch companies (if you have access to more than one). If you have permission to edit company settings, you can jump straight to that task for whatever company was shown in the breadcrumb navigation.

You can also begin the process of creating a new company from this menu:

If you work with a number of companies within the MyKinsta dashboard, you can start typing in the search area to filter the list of companies available to you:

An icon bearing the WordPress logo appears to the right of the Company entry. Clicking the icon will display the list of all WordPress sites and environments — just like selecting WordPress sites in MyKinsta’s left-hand menu.

(If you are accessing one of Kinsta’s Platform as a Service offerings, the icon here will represent Applications, Databases, or Static Sites.)

Next in this breadcrumb navigation is the currently active WordPress site and a drop-down menu that allows you to switch sites and access the Create new site task:

Like with the Company entry in the breadcrumb navigation, you can also enter a search term to filter the list of sites:

When working with WordPress sites, Environments come last in the breadcrumb navigation. Clicking on the currently active environment launches a drop-down that allows you to switch environments or start the process of creating a new one:

And, again, search is available, targeting the environments associated with the currently active site:

“Jump to or search” is still available

The Jump to or search dialog we unveiled in 2024 can be accessed by clicking the magnifying glass icon on the top menu or (as before) pressing CMD + / or CTL + / on the keyboard.

This feature continues to serve as a shortcut to all companies linked to your account, as well as any Kinsta-hosted WordPress sites, Applications, Databases, and Static Sites.

You can use the keyboard to navigate entries in the Jump to or search dialog along with its own search capabilities:

And that’s it! We’d love to hear if this update to MyKinsta navigation makes things easier for you.

Powerfully simple WordPress hosting

Kinsta is an industry-leading provider of managed hosting for WordPress sites, and we are always engineering new ways to simplify website maintenance for our customers.

If you’re looking for lightning-fast and secure WordPress hosting, explore Kinsta’s plans to find the one that fits your company best.

The post Get things done faster with new MyKinsta navigation appeared first on Kinsta®.

WordPress site operators who want to adopt the very latest version of PHP can make the move within the MyKinsta dashboard or via the Kinsta API.

Before you switch to PHP 8.4

PHP has some new features you might be eager to use in your projects, but there are a few things to consider before making the jump.

• This latest version of PHP is billed as having just beta support within WordPress 6.7 (currently the most recent) and is officially unsupported in earlier WordPress releases. (Even PHP 8.3, released last year, is supported only in beta back through WordPress 6.4, so that’s why our recommendation for most WordPress customers at this time is PHP 8.2.)
• The New Relic monitoring and ionCube Loader tools do not currently support PHP 8.4, so those will remain disabled in MyKinsta for now.
• Please make backups! As we recommend to anyone making major changes to their website, create a site backup in case things go very wrong. (Fortunately, in most cases, the solution to a broken website after moving to a new PHP engine is simply reverting to the previous release, which is easily done in MyKinsta or through the Kinsta API.)
• Even if you’ve made backups and have determined that your site’s current theme and plugins support PHP 8.4, we still suggest that you make your first foray into the new release on a staging environment. Repeat on your live site only when you’ve confirmed that staging performs without errors.

How to switch to PHP 8.4 in MyKinsta

To upgrade a WordPress environment PHP 8.4, log in to MyKinsta and navigate to WordPress Sites > environment name > Tools , then click the Change button on the PHP settings card:

Alternatively, you can perform a PHP update in bulk for multiple environments from the WordPress Sites page. In the example below, we’ve selected the checkboxes beside the names of multiple staging environments and are choosing Change PHP settings from the Actions dropdown menu:

Whichever path you choose, the next step is to choose the PHP version you want to adopt and click the Change PHP settings button:

Note: When bulk-updating multiple WordPress environments, the version of PHP chosen above will be applied to all of them.

The switch to a different version of PHP takes a few minutes. The PHP engine will restart to load the new version, making your WordPress admin dashboard unavailable for a few seconds. You will receive a notification within MyKinsta when the process is complete.

Kinsta: Always looking ahead

We’re excited to make PHP 8.4 available on our servers for our hosting customers. Keep an eye out for our annual PHP benchmarking, where we’ll be testing how this new release performs behind a number of PHP-powered content management systems, including WordPress.

Looking for premium hosting on PHP 8.4? Find a Managed Hosting package here that’s right for you.

The post PHP 8.4 is now available for Kinsta’s WordPress customers appeared first on Kinsta®.

Anyone who spends much time reading Kinsta’s Documentation, our Blog, or Knowledge Base might get the feeling some characters in our story have changed, but the same PHP workers we’ve talked about for a long time are simply performing the same tasks under a different name.

What’s the deal with PHP workers and threads?

The reason we care about this terminology is because the PHP interpreter that processes the scripts behind an application like the WordPress CMS runs single-threaded. That means requests that arrive (more or less) simultaneously would naturally be queued for processing one at a time. That can slow things down for your website’s visitors.

A solution we’ve employed at Kinsta for a long time is to simulate a multi-threaded environment by providing access to PHP in multiple distinct partitions of memory. Each block of memory can still serve just one PHP thread, but all of them can execute simultaneously to share the work.

So, “workers” was a term that seemed like a good idea (at the time).

Why Kinsta customers should be aware of threads

For customers with higher-traffic WordPress sites, optimizing PHP performance can be a delicate balancing act between the number of PHP threads available to process requests simultaneously and the amount of memory available to each.

PHP is not invoked when a website delivers cached content in response to a browser request, but it’s required whenever a script needs to be interpreted for tasks like querying the database and building pages on the fly.

Sites with many simultaneous users might benefit by having more threads available. Sites that depend on intensive database queries and processing large arrays of data might benefit by having more memory available to each thread.

We expect that Kinsta’s new PHP Performance Add-on (available within the MyKinsta dashboard and the Kinsta API) will raise the profile of threads for many customers. By using a term common across the hosting industry for these processes, we hope users will be able to better picture what’s happening under the hood of our platform.

Our goal: The fastest, most reliable WordPress hosting

We are always looking for ways to make managed hosting for WordPress more powerful, more reliable — and simpler.

If you need a fast WordPress site that’s also secure, check out our hosting plans to find the one that meets your needs.

The post Those things we called PHP workers? Now we’re calling them threads appeared first on Kinsta®.