PHP is a programming language that has been around since the dawn of the modern World Wide Web. While new kids on the tech block have been trying to dethrone it, PHP keeps on being the powerhouse behind an impressive number of websites. In fact, the majority of the web is powered by PHP, to a greater or lesser degree.
You might have heard claims such as “PHP is dead,” “It’s slow,” or that “Real programmers use XYZ.” Yet it is 2024 at the time of writing this, and not only is PHP still around, but it remains the most popular language for web development by a long shot. So, how can it be that so many developers heralded its demise? Why does this veteran scripting language absolutely refuse to become obsolete tech?
The Numbers Don’t Lie
Let’s start with some cold, hard data to put things in perspective. According to the latest stats, PHP (which refers to hypertext preprocessor, an open-source scripting language) powers a whopping 76.5% of websites across the web where the server-side language can be identified. That’s over three-quarters of the entire web.
Now, you might be thinking, “Sure, but those are probably just basic sites and blogs, not the heavyweights.” That may seem like a reasonable assumption, but it isn’t really true. While PHP’s dominance is most visible in content management systems like WordPress (which itself runs on PHP and commands 43% of the website market share), its reach extends far beyond these spots.
Heavyweights like Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) had their very foundations built on PHP in the early days. And despite evolving to eventually use languages like Hack, PHP still forms a central part of their tech infrastructure. When billion-dollar businesses are heavily invested in your code, you must be doing something right. Moreover, given how deep that base goes, upgrading would neither be financially viable nor practically necessary.
The Old But With New Tricks
One of the biggest complaints laid against PHP over the years has been performance concerns. There is some truth to this claim. The early versions of PHP were indeed somewhat sluggish. However, PHP has seen major performance and stability upgrades in recent years.
The jump from PHP 5 to 7 delivered massive performance improvements, with some benchmarks showing it was twice as fast. And PHP 8, which came out in 2020, brought even more rocket fuel to the party with just-in-time (JIT) compilation, among other enhancements.
What all this means is that current PHP versions can absolutely keep up with the speed of today’s impatient web audiences. Combine it with all the performance optimization tricks and caching that seasoned PHP developers have added to their toolboxes over decades, and you have a high-octane web development experience.
However, it isn’t only the need for speed that’s driven PHP’s evolution. The language continues modernizing to stay relevant, introducing features like scalar/return type declarations, attributes, and union types. So, PHP developers get to enjoy the clean code and explicitness of newer languages while working with a tried-and-true system. Consequently, that familiarity, in tandem with change, makes it continuously appealing.
Ecosystem Evolution
A language’s age also means its maturity, which is a benefit. Performance and fresher language features are certainly excellent, but one of PHP’s biggest strengths lies in the sheer size of its ecosystem. This vastly experienced community has produced thousands of frameworks, libraries, and tools to turbocharge your web app development. Its age means that it is well-known and well-documented in a way that a newer language cannot quite match.
While disruptive new frameworks emerge almost constantly in trendier languages, PHP’s ecosystem has remained relatively stable and booming. You have modern powerhouses like Laravel and Symfony that continue to receive active development and community support. Pair those with robust e-commerce frameworks like Magento, content management solutions like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla, and every utility library under the sun, and you have incredible infrastructure to build upon.
This incredibly deep pool of resources is a big reason why PHP has remained so ubiquitous and relevant. It lowers the barrier to quickly developing secure, high-performance web apps by allowing developers to avoid reinventing the wheel and, instead, reusing battle-tested components.
Another nifty part of this ecosystem is the vast number of platforms built on PHP on which developers can easily deploy code. That includes everything from basic shared hosts to Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk. You can even run PHP on Google’s Cloud if you wish to. Having this flexibility baked in shows PHP’s sticking power.
The Community Force
Open-source software lives or dies by its community. If you don’t have an active group of contributors identifying issues, building new features, and releasing updates, your codebase can grow stale and insecure quickly.
Thankfully, PHP’s community remains as energetic as ever, with hundreds of contributors to the core codebase working on pushing the boundaries every year. This is a language that has remained super relevant for nearly three decades because its support system keeps injecting new life into it, not letting it become outdated. This matters because it shows how dynamic engagement allows for a technology (or even a piece of software) to perpetuate itself indefinitely.
Beyond the core, spaces, and forums like Stack Overflow remain flooded with PHP questions and knowledge sharing. In-person PHP meetups and conferences continue drawing crowds of devs looking to learn and connect each year. There are entire sectors dedicated to all things PHP, such as the PHP[ARCHITECT] magazine.
When you have such an active, passionate community rallying behind technology, it’s tough for that technology to lose relevance. There will always be those pushing it forward into new eras of development.
The Corporate Seal of Approval
While individual developers and small-to-medium software shops make up a massive part of PHP’s user base, it has also received the corporate stamp of approval from some of the biggest tech juggernauts on the planet.
Companies like Slack built their initial products on PHP, and many enterprises still have critical apps and services powered by PHP running under the hood. Even Meta (the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) maintains a PHP-based codebase alongside their forays into languages like Hack.
When you have businesses of this scale relying on your programming language for revenue-critical, difficult to alter, systems, it lends a lot of credibility. While startups will chase shiny new objects, the big players tend to move slower and value stability and infrastructure longevity. Their belief in PHP is a signal that it will remain relevant for the long haul.
Essentially Future-Proof
With the pace of technological change, it’s easy to be enamored with the trendsetting new thing that will supposedly make all programming worries go away. As a developer, you may constantly be warned that a certain language, whichever it may be, is the future, and that any alternatives will soon be obsolete.
But the truth is often far less dramatic than some eager enthusiasts (or clickbait titles) may want it to be. For PHP, the future has been arriving for over 25 years now, and it has easily ridden that wave of disruption. While individual frameworks and tools have come and gone, PHP itself has displayed incredible staying power.
Unlike many languages built for specialized or experimental purposes, PHP has remained laser-focused on serving the open web. Of course, it may not be the fastest one for machine learning or mobile development, but PHP was purpose-built to drive websites and web applications, and it continues to exceed that core use case.
As long as the internet sticks around (which seems pretty likely), the web will likely have a consistent need for server-side programming languages to make it operate. And PHP, given its ubiquity, easy learning curve, and ability to modernize over time, seems to be one of the most future-proof options in that space. And the more use it sees in new projects, the more likely it is to stick around even longer.
So, Will PHP Ever Go Away?
Based on all these factors, from the numbers to the ecosystem to the corporate approval, it certainly doesn’t seem like PHP will be going away anytime soon. In fact, it feels safe to say that PHP development will remain one of the core skills necessary for building high-quality web products for many years to come.
That said, no technology rules forever. Just as PHP rose to replace rivals like Perl and remained relevant longer than once-hot languages like ColdFusion or Classic ASP, another language will likely try to usurp PHP’s throne as the internet evolves down the line.
But much like COBOL (which was invented in 1959) still has a shockingly large number of systems running on it decades later, PHP has become so entrenched and mission-critical on the web that it will likely remain a life force in the industry for a very long time. Even when the next big thing in web programming emerges, PHP won’t disappear. It will still be there, powering a huge segment of the internet.
