ENGLISH 1302 · Frankie Wiczarski

Is PHP Dead?

The internet says yes. The data says no.

You Are Using PHP Right Now

Every time you visit a website, there is a 72% chance it is powered by PHP.

WordPress

43% of all websites

Wikipedia

Runs on PHP

Facebook

Built on PHP originally

Slack

Communication Platform

Etsy

Temu version of Amazon

Spotify

Streams music via PHP

Quora

Q&A for every subject

NASA

nasa.gov runs on PHP

Canva

Design tool built on PHP

What Is PHP?

PHP - Hypertext Preprocessor  ·  Created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994  ·  A server-side scripting language for building dynamic web pages

Think of a website like a restaurant. The menu you see is the website. But in the kitchen, someone is preparing your order: that's PHP.

🧑‍💻

You

→ click a link

🌐

Browser

→ asks server

⚙️

PHP Server "the kitchen"

→ gets data

🗄️

Database

→ builds page

📄

Your page

PHP works invisibly. You never see it, but it's running behind every page load, login, and search on millions of websites.

So Why Does Everyone Say PHP Is Dying?

#14

Popularity ranking among all programming languages

15.2%

Fewer beginners are picking PHP as their entry language

18.2%

Of all developers actively use PHP today

Laravel

In 2011, Taylor Otwell built Laravel on top of PHP, because he believed "PHP developers deserve elegant and powerful tools."

Artisan CLI

Generate anything from the terminal in seconds.

Eloquent ORM

Expressive database queries, no raw SQL needed.

Full Ecosystem

Auth, queues, cloud, and more - all first-party.

↓ What is Laravel doing today

Laravel Is Thriving, Not Surviving

70

Full-time employees dedicated to the Laravel ecosystem

$57M

Raised to expand PHP tooling and grow the ecosystem

Laravel Cloud

First-party cloud platform launched for PHP apps

Companies don't hire 70 people and raise $57M for a dying technology.

The PHP Foundation

A nonprofit backed by JetBrains, Automattic, and others, existing for one reason: "to ensure the long-term prosperity of the PHP language."

They even acknowledge the decline, and are funded specifically to reverse it.

6 Full-Time Developers

Dedicated exclusively to improving PHP. (Bergmann, PHP Foundation)

Modern Features Added

Readonly classes, Unicode string class, security audits. (Goral & Roose, JetBrains)

Even Governments Are Betting on PHP

🇩🇪 Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency

Created to invest in critical open-source infrastructure, the German government chose to fund PHP because approximately 75% of all websites depend on it. They funded improvements to security, distribution, documentation, and automated testing.

PHP Has Gotten Dramatically Better

PHP 7: Speed Revolution

2–3× faster than PHP 5. Overnight, PHP became competitive again. (Omisola, Zenrows)

PHP 8: JIT Compiler

Just-In-Time compilation brought PHP closer to the speed of lower-level languages.

PHP 8.4: Modern Standards

Property hooks, asymmetric visibility, and continued evolution. (Pątko, Fingoweb)

What Do PHP Developers Think?

✅ The Optimists

PHP is "stable, mature, and practical" - strong in 2026 with a mature ecosystem. Laravel, WordPress, and PHP 8.x improvements are proof. (Hossain Ar, DEV Community)

⚠️ The Skeptics

Fewer new developers choose PHP, which could mean fewer jobs regardless of the language's quality. Fintech and cloud-native systems increasingly prefer Python, Go, or Node.js. (Shkarubo, DashDevs)

The debate isn't whether PHP is good. It's whether enough new developers will choose it.

PHP Is Not Dying. It Is Evolving.

The evidence is clear: a government is funding it, a 70-person company is growing on top of it, a foundation of full-time developers is improving it, and it still powers 72% of the internet.

For Job Seekers

PHP developers are still in demand. The web isn't going anywhere.

For Beginners

Learning PHP with Laravel is a practical, employable skill.

For Everyone

The websites you use every day depend on this "dying" language.

Conclusion

30 Years Old. Still Building the Web.

Don't believe the headlines. The future of the internet is still being written in PHP.