Author: Manuel Lemos
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Categories: PHP community, News, Software Business
As a PHP developer, you may want to know whether there is a good market for companies willing to pay good money for you to work with PHP and buy everything you want to have a good quality of life.
Read this article to learn about the most recent market surveys that give some interesting statistics and advice about what you should do to continue to take advantage of the PHP market to have a great life as a a PHP developer.
In this article you will learn:
1. Why Do Many Developers Want To Know About the PHP Language Popularity
2. What is the PHP Popularity in 2023
3. How Can You Determine the PHP Relevance For You as a Developer
3.1 Are you an employee of a company and use PHP to develop Web sites and mobile applications?
3.2 Are you a consultant, contractor, or autonomous worker that works on projects for customers that use PHP?
3.3 Are you a business owner selling PHP products and services?
1. Why Do Many Developers Want To Know About the PHP Language Popularity
I have seen many PHP developers asking if they should continue to study PHP or invest in other languages.
They often want to work as developers and know how much money they can make as PHP developers.
To get my answer to that question, keep reading this article to the end.
2. What is the PHP Popularity in 2023
PHP is used mainly to develop Web sites and the server-side part of mobile applications.
One way to measure how many Web servers use PHP is to check the response headers when HTTP sends requests to as many Web servers as you know to exist on the Internet.
Although that approach may work for part of the Web servers, it does not help check Web servers that hide the usage of PHP to avoid being targets of security attacks that exploit PHP security vulnerabilities.
Still, suppose we check the response headers of Web servers that expose the use of PHP or other languages and technologies.
In that case, we may still have an idea of PHP popularity, even if it is an accurate way to determine the actual popularity of the language.
According to the site W3Tech, PHP is used by 77.6% of the sites that they assume PHP is used on the server side in February 2023. Compared to PHP in Web sites, they think PHP was used on the server side in January of 2022, which was 78.1%, a slight decline.
We do not know why there was this decline. If these metrics come from the analysis of HTTP response headers of the Web sites, the reduction may mean that more Web servers are no longer exposing the usage of PHP due to security reasons that I mentioned above. Still, we cannot be sure of that.
Another site that published statistics based on a people survey of popular languages was StackOverflow. In 2022 they published statistics that show that 20.87% of the developers that use StackOverflow use PHP.
Still this point of view of developers that use StackOverflow and have bothered to answer their survey.
We do not know how many of these developers can be considered representative of the whole community of developers around the world. Still 20.87% is a great market share.
3. How Can You Determine the PHP Relevance For You as a Developer
As a PHP developer, this article can only be helpful if it can help you answer questions that you may have on whether PHP is a good choice of programming language to keep investing your life and working with the PHP language.
Here are some questions that you should be able to answer to take valuable conclusions:
3.1 Are you an employee of a company and use PHP to develop Web sites and mobile applications?
If you answered yes, you can be certain that PHP is a relevant language, and you should continue to improve your PHP skills to address the needs of that company.
For instance, if the company starts providing APIs for their products, you should learn how to develop an API using PHP if you do not know how to do that already.
You should also be aware of the new features of the more recent PHP versions and the planned characteristics of future PHP versions, so you can be ready to update the PHP code of the company products that use PHP.
Keep following the PHP Classes blog for news about PHP so you can learn more about the new features and changes of the latest PHP versions. Make sure you are subscribed to the New article alerts on the PHP Classes user options page to get email newsletters when a new article appears on the blog.
If the company uses a specific framework, you should always learn about the changes made in the latest versions of those frameworks.
3.2 Are you a consultant, contractor, or autonomous worker that works on projects for customers that use PHP?
Read the answer to the previous question. Other than that, notice the requirements of the projects that are published in job publication sites like, for instance, the PHP Classes site jobs section.
If you see many jobs asking for developers that use WordPress, Laravel, or other products and technologies used in PHP projects, learn more about those products and technologies so that you can apply to more jobs and always have new projects to work on.
3.3 Are you a business owner selling PHP products and services?
The use of PHP in your projects is only relevant to anybody inside of your team because it is an internal decision of your company unless your products and services are specific to PHP developers.
If your products and services are specific to PHP developers, rest assured plenty of developers are available for you to hire. What may be difficult is to find qualified PHP developers available now for you to hire.
Many developers are available, but right now, they are busy working on the projects of other companies. Still, they will be available to hire when they end their contracts with those other companies.
You can use the PHP Classes jobs section to post a PHP job and find available developers with the skills you require from them to work for you.
If you need help hiring individual PHP developers or want to hire a complete team, we can help. In that case, feel free to contact us using the contact link on this page or the contact icons you can see on the side of this page to contact us via WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, or email.
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Comments:
1. Survey results could be inaccurate - Nikunj Bhatt (2023-02-25 22:41)
As PHP is easy to learn use... - 3 replies
Read the whole comment and replies
