database

MariaDB 10.6 reaches end of life on July 6, 2026. For WordPress and Drupal hosting, that turns older database setups from a background infrastructure detail into a defined upgrade project with version selection, testing, and rollback planning attached.

WordPress 6.6 and 6.7 made autoload behavior easier to see and stricter in places, but the Site Health warning is still only an alert. The real performance work is figuring out which options should be autoloaded, correcting how they are written, and removing stale data without breaking anything.