You don’t see it, but PHP powers many websites you use daily.
It’s been around for decades, quietly handling the backend for everything from personal blogs to huge enterprise sites.
But how does PHP fare in 2025, with all the modern programming languages and frameworks?
Is it fading into nothingness, or does it still have a place among modern languages?
We have done our research to bring you all the PHP usage statistics you need to know in 2025.
PHP is the Programming Language of Choice for 18.2% of Developers
PHP started as a simple tool for building personal websites in 1994. It didn’t take long before it became the hot, new engine of dynamic web development.
Businesses, bloggers, and e-commerce sites all relied on it to serve content to millions.
However, faster, more feature-loaded languages like JavaScript, Python, and TypeScript gained traction over the years and sent PHP into a slow decline.
The Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024, which collected insights from over 65,000 developers, reflects this shift. Only 18.2% of all respondents reported using PHP; among professional developers, the number is nearly the same at 18.7%.
Moreover, only 15.2% of new programmers choose PHP as their starting language.
The TIOBE Index, which ranks programming languages based on popularity (based on the volume of search-engine queries), shows a similar trend.
It placed PHP at the 13th rank as of March 2025.
According to TIOBE, the language has fallen sharply in popularity since 2004, when it reached a peak and even earned the title of ‘Programming language of the year’.
However, interest in it has stagnated following a sharp decline in 2014. Continuous performance and feature upgrades in PHP have prevented the language from dying out completely.
In fact, there's one area where PHP is still an immovable force: server-side programming.
PHP Remains the Most Widely Used Server-Side Programming Language
Yes, even though PHP’s popularity is shrinking among developers, it still holds the top position among server-side languages.
As of early 2025, W3Techs reports that PHP powers 74.5% of all websites with a known server-side programming language.
This dwarfs its competitors in the web server space, particularly Ruby, ASP.NET, and Java.
While its overall usage percentage among developers is significantly lower than that of languages like JavaScript or Python (which have broader applications beyond the web server), PHP's grip on its core niche remains superbly strong.
Laravel Comes Out on Top Among PHP Frameworks and Platforms
Modern PHP development relies heavily on frameworks and platforms that provide structure, reusable components, and security features.
- Laravel is overwhelmingly the most popular PHP framework. It’s a feature-rich framework that simplifies development with an expressive syntax, built-in authentication, database migrations, and an excellent ORM (Eloquent). According to JetBrains' The State of PHP 2024, 61% of PHP developers reported using Laravel regularly. Its elegant syntax, extensive features (like Blade templating, Eloquent ORM), strong community support, and rich ecosystem (Forge, Vapor, Nova) fuel its adoption.
- WordPress is the second most popular PHP platform, with a preference rate of 23% (we’ll get to this in a minute).
- Symfony and CodeIgniter also deserve attention. Symfony is a flexible PHP framework known for its modular architecture, reusable components, and scalability. It powers many enterprise applications like Drupal and Magento and is the choice for 21% of developers.
- CodeIgniter is a lightweight PHP framework designed for speed and simplicity. It is often used for building small—to mid-sized web applications and is preferred by 11% of developers (source: JetBrains).
- Other frameworks and platforms, such as CakePHP, Yii, and Laminas (formerly Zend Framework), cater to smaller segments of the community.
Since we are talking about frameworks, PHPUnit reigns as the most widely used PHP testing framework, with 50% of developers favoring it. Pest comes second and is favored by 13% of PHP devs.
WordPress: PHP's Best Product Dominates the Internet
PHP's most tangible impact on the web comes through Content Management Systems (CMS).
- WordPress, arguably PHP’s best application, powers 43.5% of all websites on the internet. This leads to its impressive CMS market share of 61.4%. No other language offers the combination of PHP’s vast ecosystem, backward compatibility, extensive developer community, and legacy plugins built around it. This single application is a factor behind PHP's massive server-side market share.
- Other PHP-based CMS platforms, like Joomla and Drupal, have smaller shares (1.5% and 0.9%, respectively) but still power millions of websites (Source: W3techs).
The ubiquity of these platforms means a constant demand for PHP developers for customization, theme or plugin development, and maintenance.
Web Development Is PHP’s Biggest Usage Scenario
Most PHP development involves building websites and web apps, including APIs—that’s what it does best. It’s the language behind some of the popular sites we use daily, including Wikipedia, Facebook, Slack, Walmart, and more.
While PHP can handle command-line scripts, background tasks, and even desktop apps (with the right extensions), these are pretty niche compared to its web presence.
Node.js has undoubtedly taken over some backend API work, but PHP’s deep integration with traditional web hosting and its stronghold in CMS will keep it a go-to choice for web development in the near future.
PHP Is Still Used for Web Scraping
While PHP web scraping is not extremely prevalent, it remains viable due to its simplicity and wide hosting support.
A PHP library for web scraping, like Goutte or Simple HTML DOM, allows developers to extract website data with minimal setup.
Though less versatile than Python for web scraping, PHP’s accessibility makes it good enough for lightweight scraping needs.
PHP Is Marching Ahead with Steady Feature Rollouts and Performance Upgrades
PHP has made great strides in recent years. The language has shaken off its old reputation for being clunky and slow.
PHP 7.0 delivered significant performance improvements (often 2-3x faster than PHP 5), and PHP 8.0 continued this trend with additions like the Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler.
PHP 8.5 is also on the horizon and is slated for a November 2025 release.
Adoption rates are great as well. While 45.3% of websites still use Version 7, Version 8 is catching up and sits at 43.1% already.
Recent PHP versions (8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3) have introduced modern features, including:
- Named arguments: Improving code readability.
- Attributes: For metadata declaration (similar to annotations or decorators).
- Constructor property promotion: Reduces boilerplate code in classes.
- Union types and intersection types: Improves the type system.
- Enums: Enums are a better way to model specific sets of values.
- Fibers: Allows lightweight concurrency.
- Read-only properties: For immutable object states.
Tools like Composer and Packagist have become indispensable in modern PHP development.
Composer makes it easy to manage project dependencies, and Packagist offers a sizable collection of reusable libraries. Together, they help developers build efficient projects without reinventing the wheel.
PHP Continues to Stand the Test of Time
PHP may no longer reign supreme, but it remains the backbone of server-side web development.
The PHP Foundation, the organization responsible for the development and maintenance of PHP, received $600,000+ in donations and investments in 2024 alone—proof that the language will continue to see further improvements.
WordPress is one of PHP’s strongest anchors. PHP will stay relevant as long as WordPress rules the CMS market. The strong framework ecosystem also works in PHP’s favor.
It may not be as widely used as JavaScript across the full stack, but with tools like Swoole, Revolt, and AMPHP, PHP is pushing into high-performance asynchronous programming.
While it no longer grabs headlines like newer languages, PHP's vast installation base, mature ecosystem, and continuous evolution prove that it will remain a part of web development for years to come to come.