The most recent version, 7, is utilized by 66.2% of all PHP-based websites today. Many of the largest firms in the world utilize PHP for their server-side programming because of the language’s flexibility and widespread adoption.

PHP Use Cases

PHP has become the de facto server-side language for various industries and technology behemoths. We segmented these businesses by industry. While some of these businesses somewhat rely on PHP, others rely heavily on it.

Social Media Sites

People who utilize social media platforms can log in to their accounts on the platform’s website. Faster database queries are one of the many ways PHP improves loading times.

Facebook

Facebook, as reported by Similarweb, receives over 22 billion monthly visits.

  • Facebook, which uses PHP, has opted to grow its PHP monolith rather than adopt a distributed microservices design, despite the dynamic scripting language’s poor reputation for scalability.
  • Hip Hop Virtual Machine (HHVM), a just-in-time compiler for PHP, enables Facebook to avoid a difficult rework that would have slowed down the firm.
  • Facebook developed its own dialect of PHP called Hack, and many of its capabilities have found their way into PHP 7 and the forthcoming PHP 8.

Flickr

There are over ten million groups and billions of photographs on the photo-sharing website Flickr. PHP is the primary server language, MySQL is used for databases, and Memcached is utilized as a caching layer; all three components of the LAMP stack are employed to run the site.

Among the many notable features of Flickr’s highly scalable design are:

  • You should consider your software to be more than just a web application. You may use many feed formats like RSS, Atom, and SOAP with your REST APIs.
  • Become a stateless person. As a result of its stateless nature, the system is easier to maintain and more resilient to updates.
  • Abstract. Set up distinct layers for the database, the business logic, the pages, the page markup, and the presentation. This allows for rapid iterative development to proceed.
  • Layer. Using layers, developers may construct page-level logic designers can use to craft an engaging user experience. In cases when designers want it, they can request page logic. It is a negotiation between the two sides.

Tumblr

Millions of people across the world use Tumblr as a social media platform to connect and express their thoughts and opinions via the medium of blogging and the sharing of photographs. The PHP server-side scripting language was officially recognized as the primary language utilized by the platform. The performance benefits of Scala led to its limited usage.

In their blog article PHP 7 at Tumblr, the Tumblr team discussed the new PHP capabilities that will simplify the lives of Tumblr’s developers.

  • The language supports giving functions specific return types. This eliminates the need for some repetitive coding and verifying function returns by hand.
  • Anonymous classes, like anonymous functions (closures), are created dynamically and can act like real classes by mimicking their behavior, enforcing interfaces, and extending other classes.
  • Security and overall speed were improved around the board in PHP 7.

Web Portals

There are a plethora of websites that provide their visitors with relevant and timely news and information. Regarding speed, PHP is a popular choice for these platforms. Following is a description of a handful of these portals and the role that PHP plays in each one.

Wikipedia

When it comes to finding knowledge on any subject, big or little, this is one of the best places to go on the web. Anonymous users provide data. PHP is the primary server language used by the platform, allowing web pages to load quickly.

  • According to the Wikimedia servers website, PHP (70%) and JavaScript (30%) are used to develop MediaWiki, the organization’s primary online application.
  • Wikipedia also migrated to HHVM in 2014 to improve speed by translating PHP code into other languages.
  • Which program(s) are responsible for keeping Wikipedia up and running? The majority of the code at the Wikimedia Foundation, where Wikipedia is housed, is written in PHP 7 and stores data in MySQL or MariaDB. ElasticSearch, a search engine built on Lucene, is used to implement searches.

Content Management Systems

When it comes to managing a website, content management systems are the way to go. Many prominent CMS systems are also based on PHP, greatly boosting language usage.

WordPress

More than 64 million websites are powered by this CMS, making it the market leader. WordPress relies on the PHP server-side programming language for its entire backend and for its lightning-fast database.

Drupal

More than a million websites, or around 2%, are powered by Drupal. For maximum safety, many government websites are hosted on Drupal, both a content management system and a content management framework.

Drupal 8 was built from the ground up using the Symfony PHP framework. This has been a major factor in developing this CMS for the better.

Since its inception, Drupal has integrated several third-party libraries and frameworks, including Symfony components, OOP, the Twig template engine, and more. It completely rewrote its foundational components, application programming interfaces, configuration management system, etc. The outcomes are impressive, as the architecture of Drupal 8 is radically different from that of Drupal 7.

Travel and Hospitality Portals

The expanding Travel and Hospitality sectors reflect the growing use of internet booking platforms. Here are a few examples of systems in this space that have taken advantage of PHP to boost their efficiency.

Trivago

Trivago is a website that allows users to compare hotel booking options and pricing. It takes data from several booking platforms to determine the best deal offers. Trivago’s technological stack is comprised of PHP, Kotlin, and GoLang, the latter of which is utilized for performance-critical aspects.

Delivery Hero

It’s a great delivery app used in over 50 countries. Restaurant fare and retail goods are both available for delivery. The company has also staffed with PHP developers to enhance the site’s backend functionality.

They also employed GoLang for several performance-related reasons, but they continue to rely on Go as their primary backend language. This is done to increase the performance of their applications.