You can encounter the following error if you have recently moved your website to new hosting or updated your PHP version to 7.0.
“Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress.”
Because your WordPress version is outdated, before version 3.9, the PHP “MySQL” extension only would be checked by WordPress. More recent versions of PHP now use mysqli and mysqlnd, since the old MySQL extension has been deprecated after PHP 5.5 and wholly excluded in PHP 7.0.
You must update the latest version of WordPress to fix your website. You need to follow a few simple steps. Your PHP version may have to be temporarily returned to something 5.6 or lower that still has the old MySQL extension.
Note: I will not recommend leaving your site on an older version of WordPress. You should always keep up to date at the core of WordPress and WordPress plugins.
If your site is on Hostgator, you don’t have this option to any longer to check those boxes. The fix I found is to update to the latest version of PHP using Hostgator’s “MultiPHP Manager” in cPanel. Then, rename php.ini to php.bak (this effectively deletes the file that is causing the problem).
Where / how do I rename php.ini to php.bak?
Brain Thorson, It’s working. Thank You for for adding your precious comment.
Brian Thorson you are a lifesaver, the php.ini change worked for me with HostGator! I’m dumping them as my host since they’ve been pretty awful to work with, but at least for now our site is back online!