Is PHP Dead or Alive? Let's Spill the Beans

If you type on Google Search – ‘Is PHP Dead?,’ you’ll come across multiple links reciting the same old narrative that PHP is dying or how the usage of PHP has been plummeting. But to be honest, we still don’t know what the future holds for this language. For now, what we can suggest is-don’t believe what people say about PHP on the internet. For beginners, it’s good to learn PHP to start your programming career. Statistics show that around 80% of websites are still written on PHP.

PHP Usage Statistics

It’s true that programming languages like Python, NodeJS, Angular, and React garner immense attention these days, but that doesn’t mean that companies have stopped hiring PHP developers.

According to trends.builtwith, PHP is powering over 34,000,000 live sites on the internet, and out of them, over 50% of websites are in the top 1 million sites. It’s conferred as a mega technology by Builtwith. Another report by W3techs confirms that PHP is used by 79.1% of all the sites whose server-side programming language is known. Simply put, and as outlined before, 8 out of 10 websites are using PHP in some way or other. You can infer that PHP is still a major player on the internet and is not going anywhere anytime soon.

So, why there is an uproar on the internet about PHP death?

Often, PHP is a target of the naysayers on the internet for being not scalable and slow. However, both the claims are baseless and far from reality. Let’s look at them.

Rumor 1: PHP is not scalable

WordPress, the king of content management systems, still leverages PHP. This robust and scalable platform powers 40% of the web, including some popular websites, including TechCrunch, The Washington Post, Sony Music, and Time INc. Besides WordPress, the other popular sites built on PHP include Facebook, Wikipedia, Pinterest, Etsy, etc. These websites receive millions of visitors daily. So, the claim made by naysayers that PHP isn’t scalable is baseless.

Rumor 2: PHP is slow

Again, this claim is also not legit.

PHP is becoming faster with every new release. Kinsta, a popular managed WordPress hosting provider performed PHP benchmark tests and found that PHP 7. x is almost two-three times faster than its previous iterations, particularly PHP 5.6. Besides performance enhancement, PHP 7. x versions come with a host of new improvements for web developers, including:

Null coalesce operator

Trailing commas

Iterable and void returns

Multi-catch exception handling

Anonymous classes

HTTP/2 server push

Final Words

The demise of PHP is just a rumor surfacing on the internet by those who don’t like PHP. If someone doesn’t like the language that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the road. From our experience, we can conclude PHP is not dying despite all the chatter over the internet. It is evolving incessantly and becoming better and stronger than ever before.