PHP has a reputation forged in 2007 and updated infrequently since. The language that gave us global state, loose typing, and WordPress security nightmares has, over the past decade, quietly become one of the most productive environments for building robust web applications.
We use PHP on roughly 40% of our client engagements. The number surprises people at conferences. It does not surprise us.
What changed
PHP 8.x is not your grandfather's PHP. Typed properties, named arguments, fibers, enums, and a JIT compiler have closed most of the language-level gaps with Python and Ruby. Composer is a first-class dependency manager. Laravel is, by any reasonable measure, the most ergonomic full-stack framework available today — and it ships with everything: queues, websockets, testing, auth, and a query builder that avoids most of the footguns of raw SQL.
Why it wins on value
PHP deployments are cheap. Shared hosting, cheap VPSes, and managed platforms like Laravel Forge mean that a Laravel application can go to production for a fraction of the infrastructure cost of a Node or Python equivalent. For South African SMEs where infrastructure cost matters, that is not a minor consideration.
We are not PHP maximalists. For ML workloads we use Python. For real-time systems we use Node. For mobile we use React Native or Flutter. But for content-driven, database-backed web applications — which is what most of our clients need — Laravel remains the fastest path from zero to production-ready.