PHP’s Continued Dominance on the Internet: Usage Statistics and Ecosystem Overview

Wikimedia Foundation chief engineer Timo Tijhof published the article “An Internet of PHP” , discussing the widespread use and importance of PHP on the web.

PHP remains the preferred programming language

According to W3Techs analysis of the top 10 million websites (as of August 2023):

PHP accounts for 77.2% of sites

ASP accounts for 6.9%

Ruby accounts for 5.4%

PHP‑based content‑management frameworks

The majority of public websites are built with PHP‑based CMSs. Among the 12 most popular CMS software, 8 are written in PHP.

Data from W3Techs on CMS usage among the top 10 million sites (each percentage point represents 100 k sites):

[PHP] WordPress ecosystem (63%)

[Ruby] Shopify

Wix

Squarespace

[PHP] Joomla ecosystem (3%)

[PHP] Drupal ecosystem (2%)

[PHP] Adobe Magento (2%)

[PHP] PrestaShop (1%)

[Python] Google Blogger

[PHP] Bitrix (1%)

[PHP] OpenCart (1%)

[PHP] TYPO3 (1%)

In practice, PHP has become almost synonymous with CMS platforms.

PHP in the e‑commerce sector

BuiltWith’s August 2023 report on online stores shows PHP still dominates:

WordPress sites using the WooCommerce plugin (global market share 24%)

Adobe Magento (7%)

OpenCart (global 2%, Russia 24%)

PrestaShop (global 2%, France 14%)

Shopware (global 1%, Germany 12%)

PHP in large‑scale scenarios

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

Vimeo engineers also note PHP’s continued success as a strong tool for rapidly growing companies.

An analysis of W3Techs data shows WordPress as the largest‑scale PHP deployment, powering Automattic’s WordPress.com with about 20 billion page views per month (Alexa rank 55).

Even sites with as little as 0.1% market share (≈100 k sites) often rely on PHP, making it the preferred framework for many 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 forum

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

MediaWiki, the platform behind Wikipedia, receives about 25 billion page views per month (Alexa rank 12) and also powers Fandom (20 billion PV, SimilarWeb rank 44) and WikiHow (1 billion PV, Alexa rank 215).

Other major internet companies that rely on a PHP tech stack include Facebook (Alexa rank 7), Etsy (66), Vimeo (165), and Slack (362).