As we plan the transition to PHP 5.3, you might be wanting to make sure your site is compatible. If you run any recent release of any of the major CMSs you should be fine, but there is a chance one of your addons could have a problem. Fortunately, setting up a local testing environment to make sure you’re prepared is a pretty straightforward process.
Setting up the environment
If you’re on Windows, all you need is WAMP Server. If you use a Mac, there is MAMP. The drawback of MAMP is that you need to have the pro version to use PHP 5.3. If you’re comfortable with command line, you can set everything up yourself.
Copying over your site
After you have your test environment running, now you need a copy of your site. Log in to cPanel and go to the file manager. From there you can select everything in the public_html folder and compress it. Then download the compressed file and delete it. Then you’ll need to go in to phpMyAdmin and download a backup of your database.
Most scripts have path or configuration options either in a configuration file or in the database. Those values will need to be changed for the site to work correctly on your computer.