Author: Jay Mehta

If you think PHP is “dead” — think again. In 2025, PHP continues to drive the web in ways many underestimate. From legacy portals to modern SaaS and APIs, PHP remains a core pillar of the internet. Here’s why and how PHP still packs massive punch.

PHP’s Unmatched Web Reach

• According to a recent survey of web-technologies, about 73% of all websites whose server-side language is known use PHP.
• Another source estimates that ~74.5% of all websites with server-side scripting use PHP, underlining PHP’s dominance among backend languages.

What this translates to is simple whenever you browse a blog, e-commerce site, small business page, or content-heavy portal, there’s a very good chance PHP is powering it behind the scenes.

Why? A few reasons:

• Mature ecosystem and hosting support almost every shared or managed hosting supports PHP.
• Massive use of PHP-based CMSs (content management systems) and web-apps, which dramatically expands PHP’s reach.

Modern PHP: Stronger, Faster, and Developer-Friendly

PHP today is not the same language it was a decade ago. The modern versions (PHP 8 and above) have introduced many features that significantly improve performance, developer experience, and maintainability.

Some of the improvements:

• Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation which boosts performance, making PHP execution much faster compared to older versions.
• Modern language constructs: named arguments, union types, match expressions, more robust type handling making PHP more expressive and safer.
• Vast ecosystem: mature frameworks, libraries and community support which help developers build everything from simple websites to large-scale applications efficiently.

Stability, Legacy & Backward Compatibility — A Mixed Blessing

Because PHP is so old and widely used, a lot of legacy code CMS sites, older applications, long-running projects is written in PHP. That means:

• Huge demand for PHP developers for maintenance, upgrades, and scaling older codebases.
• Stability for businesses: Since PHP is matured, many hosting solutions, shared-hosting setups, CMSs (themes/plugins), libraries are battle-tested.

But there’s a caveat: many sites still run old PHP versions. According to recent usage stats: among websites using PHP, about 53.7% use PHP 8, while 36.7% still use PHP 7, and a portion still on older versions.

That means as PHP developers, it’s vital we keep dependencies and PHP versions updated. Using older version helps legacy code run, but misses out on performance, security and language improvements.

PHP: Not Just Alive, But Thriving

After more than three decades, PHP remains one of the most widely used server-side languages on the web. With over 70%+ of dynamic websites powered by PHP today and a modern, evolving language core PHP still delivers value.

Whether you’re building a small blog, enterprise SaaS or API-driven backend modern PHP (with a good framework) remains a strong, pragmatic choice.

So if anyone says “PHP is dead” — you can confidently say: “Not by a long shot.”

It is been almost a decade since I started working with PHP and its frameworks, and the language has grown a lot in that time. I have always enjoyed exploring new features, better approaches, and tools that make day-to-day development more stable and well-structured.

I created this space to share the things I learn along the way. Writing about what I discover keeps me motivated to read more, stay updated, and exchange ideas with other developers who care about building good software.

What I will be exploring?

I plan to write about Laravel, Drupal, WordPress, PHP itself, and everything new that is happening around these ecosystems. If something helps me in my work, I will break it down here.

How I will write?

My goal is to keep each post short, simple, and straight to the point. Whenever possible, I will include small examples or code snippets to make things easier to understand.

Why I am doing this?

This blog is my way of learning consistently. Sharing what I learn helps me remember it better and also gives others a quick starting point.

What you can expect here?

• Clear explanations of small concepts
• Modern PHP features in easy language
• My experiments with Laravel, WordPress, and Drupal
• Short takeaways and practical snippets

If you are someone who enjoys learning and improving a little every day, I hope you find something useful here. And if not, at least this becomes my personal notebook of growth.