Is PHP Dead ?

PHP cannot die

To be fair, that number is declining. In November 2017, W3Techs had PHP as the server-side language for 80.1% of websites. That number dropped to 79.6% in June 2018, and now it’s down to 78.9% when we’re publishing this post in November 2018.

However, you also have to take some of the statistics with a grain of salt. Some of these scanning tools simply look for the X-Powered-By HTTP header. Some hosting providers, including Kinsta, remove these headers from broadcasting on the server for security purposes. Therefore, the number of sites using PHP could, in fact, be higher.

But when the number is still over 75%, it’s tough to use that decline to pronounce PHP as dead.

These numbers really shouldn’t be surprising if you think about it. First off, WordPress, the most popular in existence, uses PHP. Given that WordPress , that’s a lot of sites using PHP right there. Want to know which PHP version are you running? Check out our guide on .

But it’s not just WordPress, either. There are tons of other big and small sites built with PHP. For example, MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia, is written in PHP. And oh yeah, both and use PHP, too.

PHP Is Faster and Better Than Ever, Too

With the latest , PHP is faster than ever. Our recent show a huge performance increase for PHP 7.X over PHP 5.6.

In our tests using WordPress and popular eCommerce plugins like WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads, PHP 7.3 was pushing 2-3x the number of requests per second as PHP 5.6. And  which Kinsta made available recently is even faster.

WordPress 5.0 PHP benchmarks

Better yet, PHP 7 also , as well.

Beyond that, also bring new improvements for developers like:

It’s Easy to Find PHP Developers

Because of PHP’s popularity, it’s easy to find PHP developers. And not just PHP developers – but PHP developers with experience.

Struggling with downtime and WordPress problems? Kinsta is the hosting solution designed to save you time!

More importantly, PHP developers themselves seem to be doing just fine, as this Tweet from Brandon Savage so eloquently points out:

For newer frameworks, it’s harder to find developers, especially ones with experience.

More importantly, sometimes experience just flat out isn’t possible without a time machine. For a humorous take on it, there’s where a job description wanted a React developer with 5 years of experience back in 2017, at which point React had only been around for ~4 years.

Besides finding. a PHP developer it is . To help you we collected together some of the best free and premium . Happy learning!

You Don’t Have to Like PHP, But It’s Not Dead

You might not like PHP. Heck, even though we’re an , , and , we’d be lying if we said all of our developers love PHP.

In fact, both our and are built entirely on and React, which are both JavaScript based, not PHP. But again, not liking PHP doesn’t mean it’s dead, or even dying.

Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++, has a here:

Yes, PHP does seem to be losing some steam according to W3Techs’ data. But even if PHP keeps decreasing at the same rate, it would take 25+ years before PHP even dropped under the 50% mark!

In the end, all of these posts about “Is PHP Dead?” are really just examples of – “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”

What do you think? Is PHP dead? Do you love PHP? Do you wish you could smother PHP with a pillow? Let us know in the comments!

Get all your , and online and under one roof. Our feature-packed, high-performance cloud platform includes:

Test it yourself with $20 off your first month of or . Explore our or to find your best fit.