introduce
Thanks to artificial intelligence, we are now in a new era of computing, and the rise of PHP, a nearly 30-year-old scripting language, cannot be stopped. Now more than ever, a stable ecosystem, rather than constant drama and disagreement, is needed to build the next generation of successful products. Let me review the numbers for January 2024 together and see if PHP is dead.
PHP is dead, right?
PHP is the most commonly used and popular server-side scripting language by 2024, with an overall market share of 77.4%.
So, yes, people predicting a decline in PHP's popularity, or even death sounds like a record-break. If they keep repeating "PHP is dead!" PHP is dead! PHP is dead!" Wait another ten years ♂️
The need for PHP developers hasn't gone away
Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to collect meaningful data for PHP jobs. But in any case, I will try, even if it is not much, obviously not representative of the global market.
As I write these lines, IT Jobs Watch, a website dedicated to IT job opportunities in the UK, shows clear evidence of a higher demand for PHP developers.
The table below shows the change in rankings for PHP-related keywords over the course of a year:
Many of these keywords rank higher than they did a year ago. Not bad for a dead language!
PHP version market share in 2024
By 2024, the PHP version with the largest market share is PHP 7 (7.4 higher than the others).
WordPress requires at least PHP 7.4 to be installed. Since it is the most commonly used CMS, we can safely predict how the use of PHP 8 will skyrocket, whenever support for version 7 is discontinued.
I found it interesting to see that some of the vintage sites are still running, thanks to PHP 4 and 5. But you know what we say, right? "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"
I'm pretty sure PHP 4 is more dynamic than some of the other languages listed above
Popular sites using PHP, a presumed death language
A programming language is only considered a good choice if it can be run on a large scale by a large team. And what could be better than a list of ultra-popular websites that meet these requirements?
Someone should tell them PHP is dead!
Source: https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php
CMS (Content Management System) Market Share in 2024
The CMS with the largest market share in 2024 is WordPress, which is supposed to be based on a dead language.
The demand for content management systems (CMS) is exploding. Businesses always need to reach new customers through SEO, and a good CMS that allows you to write all the content you need for an effective SEO campaign is mandatory. This trend may never go away.
Source: https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management
WordPress market share in 2024
WordPress has a market share of more than 62.8% of all CMS sites that we know of.
I'm not surprised that WordPress is so popular. It's a CMS that's constantly evolving; There are a lot of great WordPress hosting and lots of great themes and plugins to help you achieve your goals.
Also, if you want to switch from WordPress, most alternatives offer tools to import every article you've already written. This means that WordPress is a safe place to start.
PHP Framework Market Share in 2024
According to the numbers below, the PHP framework with the largest market share in 2024 is Laravel. Laravel is the most popular on Packagist and GitHub.
The most popular PHP framework on Packagist in 2024 is Laravel. And for good reason. Laravel is a state-of-the-art framework that makes it easy to create world-class web applications thanks to its rich feature set and extensive ecosystem.
Ranking of the PHP framework on GitHub
The most popular PHP framework on GitHub in 2024 is Laravel.
Surprisingly, Laravel has grown steadily over the years, while other frameworks have stagnated, even Symfony. Of course, the success of a framework is hard to measure by the number of stars it gets on GitHub.