Most websites in the world will still use PHP in 2024! | Web Scraping Tool | ScrapeStorm

Experienced programmers may think of the joke “PHP is the best language” when talking about PHP.

This joke comes from the official documentation of PHP itself. In July 2001, the PHP documentation had the following sentence: “PHP is the best language for web programming.”

Now the question comes: is PHP still worth using in 2024?

Many people think that PHP is an old and unqualified language, but now in 2024, it is the most used language on all sites. PHP is still a good choice for web development in 2024.

(1) Performance
As time goes by, the speed of PHP becomes faster and faster, especially the latest php 8.1 and above versions are quite fast. In some cases, PHP may not be able to compete with programming languages ​​such as Go and Java, but in terms of speed alone, PHP can match Python and Node.js and may even be faster.

(2) Development Speed
PHP is very similar to Python, with only minor differences, but this similarity helps to speed up development. From performing simple CRUD operations to handling files, webhooks and websockets, everything can be completed with minimal code: almost every task you need to complete has a library available, and you don’t have to write a ton of code yourself.

(3) Deployment
One of the main advantages of PHP is that it is easy to deploy, even at scale. With just a simple PHP server and nginx, you can be up and running within a few hours.

(4) Scalability
How does PHP scale? Of course, with any programming language you need to load balance your application. Especially if you need millions of requests a day, but if you implement caching correctly at your endpoints, not doing load balancing is not a problem.

(5) Concise Code and Readability
PHP can be confusing when it comes to writing concise code, but this problem can be solved with a framework that provides templates, such as Laravel. Even for large-scale application interfaces with more than 200,000 lines of code (excluding automatically generated files), the code can maintain high readability as long as it is concise.

From the above analysis, we can assert that PHP has its own unique points in terms of performance, development speed, deployment difficulty, scalability, etc., and that PHP will be the preferred language for web development in 2024.

In fact, the latest statistics on PHP usage from W 3 Techs can also indirectly support the theory that “76.4% of all sites that know server-side programming languages ​​use PHP.” In addition, more than 70% of the world’s major sites, such as Facebook, Microsoft, and Wikipedia, use PHP as their main development language.

Therefore, as the development environment changes, the positioning of various programming languages ​​is becoming increasingly clear, and although PHP is not as popular as it once was, it is still the first choice for many people in the fields of high-speed development and low-cost development.