20 PHP Statistics That Show Its Greatness (2023)

There’s a lot to say PHPone of the most widely used and influential scripting and server-side programming languages, but let’s start from the beginning.

With its first official release in 1995, PHP has grown tremendously in popularity over the past three decades. However, its origins date back to 1993, when Rasmus Ledorf, a Danish-Canadian programmer and inventor of PHP, began working on it. In 1994, just a year after the invention, Rasmus had alpha versions of PHP running on his website so he could track who viewed his resume.

Since then, PHP has been receiving stable releases and has made it to version 8.2.7 at the time of writing, and today it has a cult following. Programmers love its backend and scripting features, which is why PHP deserves even more recognition than it has yet.

Interesting PHP facts and statistics

General PHP statistics

Now that you have learned about the most interesting PHP statistics, you can read on to find out ten more facts as we have created a list of the 20 most fascinating PHP statistics that shows the extent and influence of this programming language.

1. 77.5% of all websites with popular server-side languages ​​use PHP.

PHP is one of the most widely used programming languages ​​in the world. About four-fifths of all websites with popular backend programming languages ​​use PHP as their core.

_{source: W3Techs}

2. 33.7 million websites currently in existence use PHP.

This 77.5% represents almost 34 million live websites using PHP. In addition, almost 54 million websites have already used the PHP programming language.

_{Source: BuiltWith}

3. Famous companies with high traffic websites use PHP.

Facebook, Microsoft, Mozilla, Pinterest, Tumblr, Vimeo, Wikipedia and WordPress are just a few that leverage the power of PHP.

_{source: W3Techs}

4. 50.7% of PHP sites use PHP version 7.

PHP 7.0, despite being released in 2015, is used by over half of all PHP websites, making it the most widely used PHP version.

_{source: W3Techs}

5. Almost 5.3 million websites use PHP 7.

Even though PHP version 7 was discontinued in 2018, nearly 5.3 million (5,269,256) PHP websites still use this version of the PHP programming language.

_{source: BuiltWith}

6. Version 7.4 runs on 31.8% of PHP websites.

Almost 32% of all PHP websites like cambridge.org, psychologytoday.com and jquery.com run on PHP version 7.4.

_{source: W3Techs}

7. Version 8.0 is only used by 5.4% of PHP sites.

Compared to version 7.4, the latest major version, version 8.0 of PHP, is significantly less widespread and only runs on about 5.5% of all PHP websites.

_{source: W3Techs}

8. It powers about 45% of all Internet websites.

WordPress, one of the most famous CMS websites, accounting for 43% of all websites, uses PHP. Additionally, the numbers increase by another 3% due to two other popular CMS websites, Drupal and Joomla, with Drupal at 1.2% and Joomla at 1.8%.

_{source: W3Techs}

9. PHP’s framework usage is 21.5%.

If you look at the top 1 million websites, PHP Framework is just behind Organization Schema at about 21.5%.

_{source: BuiltWith}

10. 38.3% of PHP websites use Linux.

PHP websites run on Linux, with almost two-fifths of all PHP websites running on this operating system, making Ubuntu the most popular variant.

_{source: W3Techs}

11. Two types of web servers account for over 65% of all PHP servers.

About 34% of all PHP websites use the Nginx web server, followed by Apache, and about 31.5% of PHP websites use it.

_{source: W3Techs}

12. In terms of usage, PHP comes first.

With almost four-fifths of website usage, the PHP programming language has the most users overall, while ASAP.NET and Java are in second and third place.

_{source: W3Techs}

13. Only about 26% of developers prefer PHP.

Although PHP is a popular programming language, only about a quarter of developers prefer to use it over other programming languages.

_{source: Emizentech}

14. GitHub says only 5.3% of pulls are PHP related.

Despite being the most widely used programming language, GitHub shows that only about 5.3% of its pull requests in the first quarter of 2023 are PHP programs.

_{source: GitHub}

15. PHP developers earn an average of $95,000.

The average annual salary of a PHP developer in the US is just under $100,000, with seniors earning around $110,000 and juniors around $85,000.

_{source: Flexible}

16. The hourly rate of a PHP developer is around $45.

A PHP programmer can earn between $30 and $70 depending on whether they are a junior developer, intermediate or senior.

_{source: Flexible}

17. Google’s PHP developers earn over $200,000.

The highest paying PHP developer jobs in the US earn over $200,000 annually at Google. QuinStreet and Chegg follow him.

_{source: Glass door}

18. About 55% of PHP websites are in English.

Over half of PHP websites use English, while Spanish and Russian come in second and third at around 5% each.

_{source: W3Techs}

19. PHP’s market share is 21.5%.

If you look at the top 1 million websites, PHP has a huge lead over other programming languages ​​and has an excellent market share of over 21%.

_{source: BuiltWith}

20. Nearly 1.8 million PHP websites are based in the USA.

Most PHP website servers are located in the US, while Germany comes second with 1.73 million, followed by Russia with 1.4 million, the UK with 1 million, the Netherlands with 930,000 and France with 865,000.

_{source: BuiltWith}

Diploma

PHP has broken many usage records as one of the most consequential and widely used server-side programming languages ​​in the world. That’s why we’ve put together a list of the top 20 PHP statistics that shows the potential and extent of PHP’s use by many people and websites.