Timo Tijhof, chief engineer of the Wikimedia Foundation, published an article ” An Internet of PHP “ , discussing the widespread application and importance of PHP in the Internet.

Below is some data compiled by the article.

• PHP remains the programming language of choice

According to  W3 Techs analysis of programming languages ​​used by the top 10 million websites in the world (as of 2023.8):

• PHP accounts for 77.2%

• ASP accounts for 6.9%

• Ruby accounts for 5.4%

Content management framework based on PHP

The vast majority of public websites are built using PHP-based CMS. Based on market share, 8 of the top 12 CMS software are written in PHP.

The data below comes from  W3 Techs’ CMS usage survey of the top 10 million websites , with each percentage point representing 100,000 websites in the top 10 million.

• [ PHP ] WordPress Ecosystem (63%)

• [Ruby] Shopify

• Wix

• Squarespace

• [ PHP ] Joomla Ecosystem(3%)

• [ PHP ] Drupal Ecology(2%)

• [ PHP ] Adobe Magento (2%)

• [ PHP ] PrestaShop (1%)

• [Python] Google Blogger

• [ PHP ] Bitrix (1%)

• [ PHP ] OpenCart (1%)

• [ PHP ] TYPO3 (1%)

It has to be said that PHP is actually equivalent to CMS.

Application of PHP in e-commerce

According to  BuiltWith’s August 2023 report on online stores , it can be seen that PHP still dominates the e-commerce field:

• WordPress website using  WooCommerce plugin (global market share 24%)

• Adobe Magento (global market share 7%)

• OpenCart (global market share 2%, Russian market share  24%)

• PrestaShop (global market share 2%, French market share  14%)

• Shopware (global market share 1%, German market share  12%)

Application of PHP in large-scale scenarios

Keith Adams, chief architect of Slack, said that most of Slack’s server-side application logic is written in PHP. Relative to PHP’s advantages (lower error costs through fault isolation; safe concurrency; and high throughput), its problems are negligible.

Vimeo engineers say that Vimeo’s continued success with PHP proves that it is a great tool for fast-growing companies in 2020.

Let’s analyze the W3 Techs report again to see the size of some companies with relatively single businesses. The largest is WordPress , which powers Automattic’s WordPress.com . 20 billion PV per month (Alexa global ranking 55).

Taking a closer look at the entries accounting for 0.1% of the market share, we can see that a large number of websites are supported by the PHP system. PHP is still the preferred framework for more than 100,000 small websites.

• #23 CMS:Moodle

• #25 CMS: phpBB, such as Google’s Waze community, ApacheFriends forum, VideoLAN forum

• #31 CMS: XenForo forums such as  ArsTechnica.com and  MacRumors.com

• #33 CMS: Roundcube

• #45 CMS: MediaWiki

• #49 CMS: vBulletin Forum

• #53 CMS: IPS communities such as  MalwareBytes.com , BleepingComputer and Squarespace.com forums

MediaWiki is the platform behind Wikipedia, with  25 billion PVs per month (Alexa rank 12). At the same time, MediaWiki also drives Fandom ( 2 billion PVs per month , Similarweb ranking 44) and WikiHow (100 million visitors per month, Alexa ranking 215).

In addition, there are a large number of Internet companies using PHP technology stack, such as Facebook (Alexa ranking 7), Etsy (Alexa ranking 66), Vimeo (Alexa ranking 165) and Slack (Similarweb ranking 362).

View details: https://timotijhof.net/posts/2023/an-internet-of-php/