PHP — Statistics

At a Glance

The Numbers

77%

Server-side web share

30

Years since creation

300K+

Packagist packages

43%

Websites via WordPress

1M+

Active developers

60B+

Packagist downloads (total)

Web Usage

Server-Side Language Market Share

PHP dominates server-side web usage. According to W3Techs, PHP is used by 77% of all websites whose server-side programming language is known. No other language comes close.

PHP

77.2%

ASP.NET

6.8%

Ruby

5.4%

Java

4.5%

Python

2.3%

JavaScript

2.1%

Source: W3Techs, approximate 2024 values. Percentages of websites whose server-side language is known.

CMS Market

Content Management System Market Share

The CMS market is overwhelmingly PHP. WordPress alone holds 62.8% of the CMS market (43% of all websites). The top 4 CMSes are all PHP.

WordPress

62.8%

Shopify

6.3%

Wix

3.7%

Joomla

2.6%

Drupal

1.7%

Squarespace

1.7%

Source: W3Techs CMS usage statistics, approximate 2024 values.

Frameworks

PHP Framework Popularity

Laravel dominates the PHP framework ecosystem. GitHub stars and Packagist downloads tell the story.

Laravel

78K+ GitHub stars. Most-starred PHP repository. 300M+ Packagist installs. The dominant modern PHP framework.

Symfony

29K+ GitHub stars. Enterprise standard. Symfony components are used by Laravel, Drupal 8+, phpBB, and thousands of projects.

CodeIgniter

5K+ GitHub stars. Lightweight, minimal footprint. Popular in Asia and for projects that need simplicity over features.

CakePHP

8K+ GitHub stars. Convention over configuration. One of the earliest PHP MVC frameworks (2005). Still actively maintained.

Slim

12K+ GitHub stars. Micro-framework for APIs and small apps. PSR-7/PSR-15 compliant. Minimal overhead.

Yii

14K+ GitHub stars. High-performance framework. Strong in code generation (Gii) and ActiveRecord. Popular in enterprise.

Projects

Major PHP Projects

Project	Users / Scale	What it does
WordPress	810M+ websites	The world's most popular CMS. 43% of all websites. Plugins, themes, WooCommerce.
MediaWiki	Billions of views/mo	Powers Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. One of the highest-traffic PHP apps.
Laravel	78K+ GitHub stars	Most popular PHP framework. Eloquent ORM, Blade, queues, broadcasting.
Drupal	1.3M+ websites	Enterprise CMS. Used by governments, universities, and large organizations.
Magento	250K+ stores	Enterprise e-commerce platform. Now Adobe Commerce.
Moodle	300M+ users	World's most-used open-source learning management system.
phpMyAdmin	Millions of installs	Web-based MySQL administration. Installed on nearly every shared hosting account.
Composer	300K+ packages	PHP dependency manager. Packagist registry. Autoloading standard (PSR-4).
Matomo	1.4M+ websites	Open-source web analytics. Privacy-focused Google Analytics alternative.
phpBB	Millions of forums	One of the most-used open-source forum platforms. Since 2000.
NextCloud	400K+ servers	Self-hosted cloud storage and collaboration platform. Dropbox/Google Drive alternative.
Symfony	29K+ GitHub stars	Enterprise PHP framework. Reusable components used across the ecosystem.

PHP by the Numbers

More Numbers

77%

Server-side web share

810M+

WordPress websites

2x

PHP 7 speedup over PHP 5

78K+

Laravel GitHub stars

300K+

Packagist packages

60B+

Total Packagist downloads

28%

Online stores (WooCommerce)

1994

Year PHP was created

Perspective

Why These Numbers Matter

PHP's critics have predicted its death for over a decade. Meanwhile, PHP's actual market share has remained remarkably stable at around 77-80% of server-side web usage. Languages like Node.js, Python, and Go have grown, but primarily in niches that PHP never dominated (real-time apps, data science, infrastructure tooling).

PHP's dominance is not about hype. It's about installed base. With 810+ million WordPress websites, millions of Drupal and Joomla installations, and the entire Composer ecosystem, PHP has an inertia that no amount of "PHP is dead" blog posts can overcome. The web was built on PHP, and the web isn't going anywhere.