Competitive Analysis, Importance and Benefits of PHP in Web Development

Web is the main source of absorbing content from time off websites to business websites and everything in between. Currently, Dynamic websites have taken over static websites with the usage of flash and other tools.With the development of Internet technologies, the use of online business portals have increased numerously. You name it and there is a website hosted for it. We find everything online.

As per Internetlivestats.com the total number of websites hosted are 994,642,964 (26-02-16, 12.43 PM IST). This shows the evolution of websites on Internet. 81.9% (approx.820 million) of websites are developed on PHP (Source: w3techs.com). These statistics shows the importance of PHP among web technologies. Before discussing about benefits of PHP, let us discuss importance of PHP with some competitive analysis on numbers in this post. 

PHP: PHP is a server side scripting language, and a powerful tool for making dynamic and interactive Web pages, stated definition from w3schools.com. PHP, or Hypertext Preprocessor, is a programming language that allows the user to have more control over the HTML that makes up a web page. PHP allows many more functions than HTML does, such as DIV tables, login functions, and graphical displays. PHP is easy to learn and allows users to make a web page look and behave exactly as they want it to. So, approx. 82% (820 million) of websites use PHP as their server side scripting language. From the below chart we can easily identify the usage of PHP as compared to other popular web technologies

There are few other server side scripting languages which are used less than 0.1% of the websites, such as Lasso, Scala, Lua, Tcl, SmalTalk, C++, Haskell, Lisp and Ada.

Let us discuss about, Historical trend of PHP from the below analysis compared to other popular server side scripting language.

In the year 2015, there was a difference of 65% in market share between PHP and ASP.Net, where as in the year 2016 (February) it has a difference of 66.1%. (i.e. PHP has a growth of 1.1% of market and ASP has gone down by 1.2%).

The below diagram shows the market positions in terms of popularity and traffic of the 5 most popular server-side programming languages. (Source: w3tech.com)

How to read the below diagram

A technology in the lower right-hand side corner is used by many sites, but mostly by sites with average traffic rank. A technology in the upper left-hand side corner is used by fewer sites, but mostly by sites with high traffic. The best position would be the upper right-hand side corner. From the below diagram, it is clear that PHP is used by many sites as compared to other popular server side scripting languages. 

PHP has been evolved with many versions, the recent version of PHP is 7.0.2. Please go through the below image to understand the usage of PHP versions. In these versions PHP 5 is used by 98.6% for all websites.

Among PHP 5 Versions, PHP Version 5.3 is highly implemented with a share of 33.1%. Some of the popular sites using PHP are facebook.com, Baidu.com, Wikipedia.org, Qq.com, Twitter.com, Taobao.com, Sina.com.cn, Vk.com, and pinterest.com. PHP is used by 81.9% in which PHP 5 is used by 80.7%. 

High usage of its versions, with more than 80% of market share makes PHP a leader in web development technologies. Why PHP Development is so popular to use as a server side scripting language as analogize to other popular server side scripting languages such as ASP.Net and Ruby. Let us discuss some of the reasons in my next post. 

 Statistics and Image Credit : w3tech.com and internetlivestats.com