5 Reasons why PHP is still so important for web development

For over 25 years, PHP has been one of the most popular server-side languages predominantly used for web development. Interestingly, whenever a new development language in the web domain emerges, chatter starts about whether PHP is relevant or not anymore.

While it is true that PHP has seen a drop in popularity over the recent years (dropping from the 5th position in 2017 to 8th in 2020 in Stack Overflow annual developer survey), it’s far from ‘dead.’ Even today, nearly 80% of all websites are created using PHP in its vanilla form or through frameworks like Laravel, CodeIgniter, and WordPress.

There are many reasons to use PHP for web development, which we will explore in this article.

1. PHP is free and open-source

PHP makes web development extremely economical as a server-side language because it’s an open-source language available for free. As a web developer, you must provide clients with as many options as possible on the economic front. If you are proficient in PHP, you can offer your services for a website, e-commerce store, or any web application development at a lower cost. As an open-source language that has been around for a quarter of a century, PHP has a vast community that ensures that timely updates are made to the programming language such that it is in sync with the latest requirements of web development. The availability of a highly active community of PHP developers ensures that you always have assistance and help available whenever you are stuck with the project.

2. Compatible with all OSes

PHP also enjoys compatibility with all the available operating systems and web development technologies. You can use PHP on Windows, Linux, UNIX, or Mac. While modern web development technologies like Swift for Mac or .Net for Windows have advantages, they are not as robust as PHP. Compatibility with all operating systems implies you can deploy your PHP application or website on any web server. Furthermore, the programming language integrates perfectly with MySQL and Apache servers. As modern web development is about cross-platform compatibility, PHP is an ideal language. If you are building an application that will run on multiple platforms, choose PHP, and you don’t have to worry about what operating system is running on the server anymore.

3. Dynamic, flexible, and secure

Modern web development projects must be secured in the wake of more sophisticated cyber-attacks. One advantage of using PHP for your web applications is its fool-proof encryption. Its encryption capability and scalability make PHP an extraordinarily dynamic and flexible web development technology for any project. PHP scripts can auto-load web apps and websites without any manual intervention. Using PHP, you can script your environment to install security updates automatically. Due to its open-source nature, several encryption libraries are available, like PrivateBin, php-encryption, and Libsodium, which you can directly import your project.

4. Robust PHP frameworks

Modern websites and applications are hardly built from scratch. The availability of frameworks accelerates the development process. PHP has one of the largest collections of frameworks used for web development. That is why almost 80% of websites are built using PHP. You can choose any of the available PHP frameworks to create and launch web apps quickly and easily. These modern PHP frameworks support the MVC (Model View Controller) architecture, which expedites coding and enables developers to create efficient and top-notch solutions. Laravel, CodeIgniter, Cake PHP, Symfony, Zend Framework, and Yii are all PHP frameworks. 

To give you an idea of the popularity of these frameworks, some of the most popular websites in the world use PHP frameworks. This includes Facebook, WordPress, Tumblr, Wikipedia, Slack, and Canva.

A notable mention is Canva, an Australian graphic design platform introduced in 2013. Today, it is one of the most popular online platforms for graphics design. It chose PHP as its server-side language, which indicates that even modern enterprise-level websites use PHP.

5. Database flexibility 

Web applications today consume and produce data in terabytes; that’s a lot. To empower such websites and applications, you need scalable databases that support modern technological infrastructure. MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Big Data, etc., are some of the most popular current databases, and PHP is compatible with every single one. It is a highly flexible language in database connectivity, allowing you to use any database in your web application. Another advantage of this flexibility is that you can migrate your web application to another database without worrying about compatibility issues.

Conclusion 

PHP is still one of the leading programming languages for web development. It offers the most cost-friendly, flexible, secure, and robust development options, whether it’s a website, e-commerce store, or any other web application. There are many reasons to use this feature-rich programming language, but we hope the above reasons will encourage you to learn PHP.

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