From WordPress to Wikipedia, e-commerce to enterprise SaaS. PHP powers every corner of the web.
PHP dominates CMS. WordPress (43% of all websites), Drupal (government, enterprise, higher education), Joomla (portals, community sites). The entire content management ecosystem runs on PHP.
The majority of online stores run PHP. WooCommerce (WordPress plugin, 28% of all online stores), Magento (enterprise), PrestaShop, OpenCart. PHP is the backbone of e-commerce.
Facebook was built on PHP. The largest social network in history ran PHP for over a decade. Meta eventually created Hack (a PHP derivative) and HHVM to handle Facebook's scale, but the DNA is PHP.
Modern PHP frameworks rival the best in any language. Laravel (most-starred PHP repo on GitHub), Symfony (enterprise standard), CodeIgniter (lightweight), CakePHP, Yii, Slim (micro-framework).
PHP excels at building APIs. Laravel's API resources, Symfony's API Platform, and GraphQL via Lighthouse make PHP a first-class choice for backend APIs serving mobile apps and SPAs.
Major SaaS products were built on PHP. Slack's original backend, Mailchimp, Canva (partially), and countless B2B SaaS platforms use PHP. Laravel Vapor enables serverless PHP on AWS.
Wikipedia runs on PHP. MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia and its sister projects (serving billions of page views per month), is written entirely in PHP. It's one of the highest-traffic PHP applications in the world.
Moodle, the world's most-used open-source learning management system, is written in PHP. Used by universities, schools, and corporations worldwide to deliver online education to hundreds of millions of users.
The forum era was built on PHP. phpBB, vBulletin, XenForo, Discourse (backend components), and Flarum. Online communities and discussion boards have been PHP's domain since the early 2000s.
Self-hosted analytics and monitoring tools built in PHP. Matomo (Piwik) is the leading open-source alternative to Google Analytics, processing millions of page views for privacy-conscious organizations.
Modern PHP powers headless content management. Strapi alternatives like Statamic, Directus (PHP-originated), and WordPress REST API / WPGraphQL serve content to any frontend framework via APIs.
Modern PHP isn't limited to request/response. Swoole and RoadRunner turn PHP into a long-running, async-capable server. Octane (Laravel + Swoole) handles thousands of concurrent connections.