77.7% of all websites use PHP as their server-side programming language.
Furthermore, PHP held a 45.41% market share in 2021.
Facebook. Wikipedia. MailChimp. These are some of the tech giants that use PHP.
We know what you’re thinking, “Let’s hire PHP developers.”
However, won’t it be better to know why everyone loves PHP first? This article will help you with that.
In the next five minutes, learn 10 reasons to prefer PHP in 2022:
- How does the open-source nature save money
- How scalable PHP is
- How fast PHP is
- How frequently does PHP offer updates
- How high level of security does PHP offer
- How many plugins does PHP offer
- How much is the cost of development that PHP offers
- How fast and efficient support PHP offers
- How detailed documentation PHP offers
- How vast a community PHP offers
Note: the information is true at the time of writing. That’s March 2022.
10 reasons to prefer PHP in 2022
1. The open-source nature saves money
The open-source nature — one of the advantages of PHP — allows businesses to never pay any license fee for using the software. Furthermore, most development tools used in combination with PHP are open-sourced as well. Thus, you save more on your budget.
The open-source programming language allows you to:
- Grow and modify your business website as PHP is available for change
- Receive better quality code as numerous people have critiqued the code
- Fix bugs and offer updates within days or even hours as open-source code is responsive
- Use managed databases with database servers such as Amazon RDS
2. PHP is scalable
Every business dreams of getting high website traffic. However, high traffic can cause the website to slow down or crash. The result? Let the data answer:
- 40% of website visitors will stop interacting with your site if the website takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Conversion rates increase by 8.4% when mobile site speed increases by 0.1 seconds.
- An hour of unexpected downtime can result in a loss of $1 million for large companies. That’s excluding penalties and legal fines.
The solution? Scalability, which is one of the benefits of PHP.
PHP supports all the famous frameworks such as:
- Symfony
- Laravel
- Zend
- CodeIgniter
- CakePHP
The PHP-based web solutions are scalable as well. Furthermore, PHP works across all web browsers; thereby making scalability even easier.
3. PHP is extremely fast
Here are a few stats about website speed:
- A one-second delay in web page load speed lowers customer satisfaction by 16%.
- 1 out of every 4 visitors will leave a website that takes over 4 seconds to load.
- Web pages that take 5 seconds to load have a 38% bounce rate.
Can PHP solve this problem? Yes; speed is another reason for choosing PHP. Here’s why.
PHP uses its own memory to run the functions. The feature leads to faster processing time than other programming languages.
PHP 8.0 is the fastest version of the programming language. The programming language version offers a response time of 164 ms.
4. PHP offers frequent updates
Here’s why you must update your programming language:
- Older versions never receive security patches. Thus, your site stays vulnerable to cyber attacks.
- Older versions will have a slower page load speed than updated versions. Lower page load speed will increase the bounce rate and affect the SEO rankings of the website.
- Older versions stop receiving support from the developers.
Thus, if you’re asking, “Why choose PHP for web development?”, receiving frequent updates is one of the answers.
PHP releases new updates each year. Older versions receive support for 2 years after the initial release date. Afterward, the version will receive only critical security updates. Furthermore, after 3 years the older version won’t receive any updates.
5. PHP offers high levels of security
One of the advantages of PHP over other languages is each code runs exclusively on the server in PHP. The programming language offers in-built security features that protect the site against common threats such as:
- SQL injections
- Data tampering
- Cross-site request forgery
Follow the below-mentioned steps to increase the site security even further:
- Deploy PHP apps on the clouds
- Hide files from web browsers
- Use SSL certificates for HTTPS
- Update to the latest PHP version to receive security patches and bug fixes
Disable the display of errors
6. PHP supports all major databases
If you don’t have a solid database to hold your data, the data quality doesn’t matter. PHP allows developers to choose from all the major database options depending on the developer’s budget:
- MySQL
- Oracle
- Microsoft SQL server
- MariaDB
- PostgreSQL
Furthermore, you can go for hosting options such as Google Cloud Platform or Amazon Web Services.
You can choose open-source applications such as phpPgAdmin or phpMyAdmin to manage databases through a web interface.
7. PHP offers lower costs of development
Over 6.1 million That’s the number of developers across the globe that work with PHP. The huge number of developers lead to lower hiring costs. Thus, the project cost reduces.
PHP developers charge between $60 to $80 per hour on average. If you hire a PHP developer from countries such as Ukraine, the charges reduce to up to $40 an hour.
Furthermore, full-time PHP developers in the U.S. earn $102,954 a year on average. Full-time PHP developers in Asia earn $9,000 at the same time.
8. PHP offers fast and efficient support
How? Two words; vast community. Over 6.1 million developers worldwide use PHP. Furthermore, tech giants such as WordPress, Tumblr, and Flickr use the programming language as well.
Thus, you can always expect to find answers to your queries within no time.
9. PHP offers detailed documentation
You can receive PHP documentation in the following languages:
- English
- Spanish
- French
- Chinese
- German
- Brazilian Portuguese
- Turkish
- Russian
- Japanese
You’ll find the most accurate information in the English version.
Furthermore, you can install phpDocumentor as well. The de-facto documentation application for PHP projects offers:
- Information from the DocBlocks to offer more insight
- UML Class Diagram using GraphViz or PlantUML for projects
- In-built CI support with Docker image or GitHub Action
10. PHP offers a vast community
Facebook, Lyft, Slack, Wikipedia, MailChimp — these are some of the giants that use PHP. Furthermore, PHP ranks 8th on GitHub with 5% pull requests.
Add to that the over 6.1 million PHP developers across the world and you’ll have an idea of how vast the PHP community is.
A vast community translates to:
- More tutorials, reading materials, and courses to learn from
- Continuous work on the PHP code that makes the programming language even better
Answers to all your queries 24X7 as many developers are quite active on the platform
Reasons to prefer PHP — the programming language will continue to thrive
76.1% of all websites that rank in the top 1,000,000 use PHP as their server-side language. Thus, the programming language isn’t going anywhere soon.
Furthermore, now that you know all the reasons to prefer PHP, you too will want to get on the wagon to use this excellent programming language.
Read more: What Is Web Scraping & Does It Work in 2022?
