PHP Remains the Dominant Backend Language: Usage Statistics and Ecosystem Overview

Wikimedia Foundation chief engineer Timo Tijhof recently shared data on PHP usage, emphasizing its critical role on the Internet.

PHP Remains the Preferred Programming Language

From the W3Techs report "Analysis of Programming Languages Used by the Top 10 Million Websites (as of August 2023)", PHP accounts for 77.2% of sites, far ahead of ASP (6.9%) and Ruby (5.4%).

PHP‑Based Content Management Frameworks

The majority of public websites are built with PHP‑based CMSs; 8 out of the top 12 CMS products are written in PHP. Each percentage point in the W3Techs analysis represents roughly 100 000 of the top 10 million sites.

WordPress ecosystem (63%)

Joomla ecosystem (3%)

Drupal ecosystem (2%)

Adobe Magento (2%)

PrestaShop (1%)

Bitrix (1%)

OpenCart (1%)

TYPO3 (1%)

Other notable platforms: Shopify (Ruby), Wix, Squarespace, Google Blogger (Python)

PHP's Application in E‑commerce

BuiltWith’s August 2023 report shows PHP still dominates the e‑commerce sector:

WordPress sites using WooCommerce – 24% global market share

Adobe Magento – 7% global market share

OpenCart – 2% globally (24% in Russia)

PrestaShop – 2% globally (14% in France)

Shopware – 1% globally (12% in Germany)

Tijhof also cites Ars Technica, which notes that "PHP still maintains a huge leading advantage".

PHP's Use in Large‑Scale Scenarios

Slack’s chief architect Keith Adams states that most of Slack’s server‑side logic is written in PHP, praising its fault isolation, security concurrency, and high throughput.

Vimeo engineers echo this sentiment, calling PHP a "great tool for fast‑growing companies in 2020".

WordPress, driving Automattic’s WordPress.com, sees 20 billion page views per month (global Alexa rank 55). Even sites with less than 0.1% market share rely heavily on PHP, showing its dominance among small‑to‑medium sites.

#23 CMS: Moodle

#25 CMS: phpBB (e.g., Google Waze community, ApacheFriends forum, VideoLAN forum)

#31 CMS: XenForo (e.g., ArsTechnica.com, MacRumors.com)

#33 CMS: Roundcube

#45 CMS: MediaWiki

#49 CMS: vBulletin

#53 CMS: IPS Community (e.g., MalwareBytes.com, BleepingComputer, Squarespace.com forum)

MediaWiki powers Wikipedia and many third‑party encyclopedias, delivering 250 billion page views per month (Alexa rank 12), and also drives Fandom (20 billion PV) and WikiHow (1 billion PV).

Other major internet companies using PHP include Facebook (Alexa rank 7), Etsy (66), Vimeo (165), and Slack (362).

Tijhof concludes that PHP’s large, productive community, ease of learning and extensibility give it an irreplaceable position today.