We use Stripe as our payment processor here at Cinch. We love the streamlined approach to almost everything Stripe does – from the user checkout experience to our own account management. It’s a solution we often suggest to our clients for the very same reasons.
Stripe WooCommerce v3.1.0
Last Friday (March 17th) WooCommerce released a new version of their free Stripe payment gateway plugin. It brought some pretty exciting new changes, namely Apple Pay and Google Payment Request (not quite sure what this is yet however).
It also quietly brought a new requirement: PHP 5.6. I say quietly because it wasn’t documented, and some of our clients found out the hard way:
After updating the plugin, Stripe simply stoped working. For clients who use only Stripe as a payment gateway, this left their shops unable to process orders.
Fixing the issue
There are a couple of ways we handled this with our clients, and each will work for you:
- Downgrade to version 3.0.7. This got shops back up and running, but doesn’t address the long term issue of not being able to update the plugin.
- Upgrade PHP to 5.6. Encourage your web host to upgrade PHP. While this can work in some cases, for sites that are on inexpensive shared hosting it may not be an option.
- Upgrade hosting account. If a host isn’t willing to upgrade PHP, you may have no choice but to get better hosting
WordPress now recommends PHP 7. In our experience, some sites still have trouble with PHP 7, but we’ve run into zero issues thus far with PHP 5.6. There really is no reason for web hosts not to offer 5.6 at a minimum.
If you’re still having trouble getting WooCommerce – Stripe to work on your site, start a chat, we may be able to help!
9 Comments
Thanks so much for posting this solution. I had the same error because of my site using PHP 5.3. I’ve had to downgrade the Stripe plugin temporarily whilst I wait for my host to upgrade to PHP 5.6. Looking forward to accepting Apple Pay in future though!
Hey Jack, glad we could help. We still need to implement Apple Pay, but I’m also very excited about it. I only wish my local grocer would accept it!
Hi,
Just installed the latest version of Stripe, but I get a message that I need to upgrade to PHP 5.6.0. The thing is… I am using PHP 5.6.0! Looks like the plugin is detecting an older version of PHP. Could that be possible?
Hi Eilon,
That message should also tell you which version it thinks you’re running. What version did it say?
If you’ve just upgraded PHP, perhaps you need to reboot the server. Where are you hosting the site?
~ Bryan
This is weird. I reboot the server but the warning message is still showing… Any ideas?
It’s possible that you’ve updated the server, but not set each site to specifically use a newer version of PHP. If you have WHM installed, check the Multi PHP tab and see if your cPanel account is set correctly.
Other than that it’s really hard to say without taking a look at the server. You could sign up for our service for a month free (chat us up for the code) and we could take a look ;)
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Hi everyone, I can´t seem to have Stripe shown as a payment method even dough I´ve checked configurations many times. I´m using the “Woocommerce Stripe Payment gateway” which is the official versión. The PHP version is 6.3 and the plug-in version is the latest 4.1.1. Do you think my theme is the problem? I don´t know what to do.
Hi Agustin, I’d need to know more about your situation. There is no PHP version 6.3 for example. The latest version of WooCommerce Stripe is 4.1.11. Get ahold of us via chat, and I’ll see if I can help.