10 Global Websites Using PHP: The Power and Potential of PHP

Elite organizations rely on large-scale, intimidating tech stacks for their backend. Many people coming from that background, working on things like massive financial applications, still struggle to believe that PHP can be used for major, successful projects.

But you’d be surprised.

PHP supports products of every size, from a one-person blog to a payments platform.

Today, PHP runs on 69.7% of the websites whose server-side language is known, according to W3Techs (October 2026), down from 73.2% a year earlier.

That includes global fintech platforms. PHP 8.5, released in November 2025, continues the language’s yearly release cycle, and 45.1% of PHP sites now run version 8. Far from being “dead,” PHP keeps evolving and delivering results at scale.

Let’s look at ten global websites using PHP, including:

1. Facebook
2. Wikipedia
3. Tumblr
4. Slack
5. MailChimp
6. Etsy
7. WordPress
8. Mollie
9. Flickr
10. Upwork

PHP is here to stay, with an ever-increasing demand amongst some of the most prominent tech leaders in the global economy.

We have the developers you need to take your development project in the right direction, including in heavily regulated niches like fintech.

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What is PHP?

Starting as a small open-source project way back in 1994, Rasmus Lerdorf unleashed PHP as an intuitive server-side scripting language.

Here’s a short and sweet rundown of PHP:

• PHP stands for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor,” a recursive acronym (it began life as “Personal Home Page”)
• It’s widely used in small and large industrial applications, existing as an open-source scripting language.
• PHP scripts are executed directly on the server end
• Its compilers and extensions are free to download and use

Similar to any other staple scripting language, PHP allows software developers to directly integrate logic into the creation of web page content and efficiently manage data returned from a web browser.

PHP also contains numerous out-of-the-box extensions that make it easy for back-end engineers to interact with databases.

Frameworks like Laravel, Symfony, and CodeIgniter have modernized PHP development, making it faster and more scalable for businesses of all sizes.

The language is intuitively designed to extract relevant data for display on a web page, storing any information entered by a website visitor in its corresponding database defined by its script.

These days, PHP is used for its cross-platform compatibility, easy integration with databases, and a mature ecosystem that supports everything from small business websites to enterprise applications.

All in all, PHP consists of two simple moving parts: a scripting language and an interpreter.

Web and PHP developers can utilize scripts to define server-side behavior and logic they need in a web app.

These scripts can be conveniently embedded into HTML markup documents that are served at the front end of the web server.

An interpreter behaves as a backend module that integrates into the web server.

It actively converts scripts into explicit commands that the computer executes to achieve outputs defined in the script by the web developer.

In practice, this means PHP remains one of the most flexible and accessible languages for building dynamic web applications.

Main functions of PHP

PHP can seamlessly perform the following functions:

• Generating dynamic page content that can be easily updated
• Creating, opening, reading, writing, and terminating files on the server
  Ability to collect form data (a pretty popular application, by the way!)
• Sending and receiving cookies
• Used for controlling user access
• Encrypting sensitive user data

What Are the Advantages of Using PHP?

Before diving into the business-level advantages of PHP, take a look at a few of its leading qualities as a server-side programming language:

• PHP has cross-platform applications, running on Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, and an array of other supported operating systems
• It’s compatible with nearly all modern servers (e.g., Apache, IIS, etc.)
• It is open-source and free to use. You can download it officially at https://php.net.
• PHP is easy to learn and runs/modulates efficiently on the server-side

PHP also comes with performance improvements through PHP 8.5, stronger typing options, and active community-driven security updates that keep it competitive with newer languages.

PHP’s Open-Source Delivery Saves Budget

Although open-source programming languages in the 21st century are not unfamiliar to the average developer, it is a particularly unique advantage for companies looking to scale their PHP development workflow.

PHP is available for free and requires no download or licensing fees. This accessible distribution brings about a large and active international community.

The result of an open-source software community that’s nearly three decades old is continual enhancements in functionality and an expanding pool of resources and facilities.

Developers no longer have to ‘reinvent the wheel’ because hundreds of viable, out-of-the-box PHP-based solutions are being released every year.

Today, the ecosystem includes mature frameworks (Laravel, Symfony), package managers (Composer), and CMS platforms (WordPress, Drupal, Magento) that drastically reduce time to market.

PHP Development Saves Time

PHP supports object-oriented programming (fully since PHP 5), which lets teams package code as reusable components.

Reusable PHP components save hours of time and effort in the software development cycle.

PHP frameworks such as Symfony, CodeIgniter, and Laravel, and CMS platforms such as Joomla and WordPress, carry functionality and offer efficient and secure development processes that alleviate the stress for everyone on the team.

Since its founding, PHP has been optimized for programming various web applications through built-in GET and POST functions, as well as HTML and URL script functionality.

For businesses, this saved time translates to decreased busywork and a return on investment sooner rather than later.

Typed properties and other PHP 8 features speed up development, while JIT compilation tends to help CPU-heavy code more than typical database-bound web requests.

PHP Code Is Flexible and Integrative

As highlighted earlier, PHP code is cross-platform. You can run and deploy PHP on major operating systems, including Windows, Unix, Linux, and macOS.

PHP’s server-side versatility is even better.

PHP runs behind Apache, Nginx, and Microsoft IIS, and connects to more than 20 databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB.

With PHP, businesses can seamlessly build cross-platform applications without worrying about compatibility errors.

Organizations can now leverage existing tech infrastructure with little to no expenditure.

In addition, PHP integrates easily with cloud environments and modern DevOps pipelines, making it a practical choice for hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.

PHP’s Lightning Speed Performance Helps To Retain Customers

To effectively retain website audiences, page loading speed is crucial.

Google’s research found that the probability of a bounce rises 32% as mobile page load time goes from one second to three seconds (Think with Google). If a website’s database queries run slowly, visitors leave.

However, PHP ensures quick turnaround times by utilizing fast data processing features, excellent customization potential, and efficient integration with a variety of custom management systems.

PHP Speed Comparison

Benchmarks of recent PHP 8 releases show significant gains over PHP 7, so modern PHP applications can handle more requests per second at lower latency.

Tumblr reported striking gains after moving its web fleet from PHP 5 to PHP 7 in 2016, and Wikimedia moved Wikipedia off HHVM and onto PHP 7 in 2019 once benchmarks showed HHVM no longer held a performance edge.

PHP scripts can be easily embedded into HTML files, allowing developers to convert existing static website code into dynamic front-end apps just by integrating PHP.

Overall, PHP is an excellent programming language for the creation of full-fledged websites based on static HTML.

Related Reading: KPIs for Software Development

10 Global Websites That Use PHP

There are so many global websites and companies using PHP that it would be impossible to go over them all. Instead, let’s look at the top 10.

1. Facebook

Perhaps the most notorious social media web application, Facebook was built on PHP. Its last Facebook-only figure, 2.11 billion daily active users in December 2023, has since given way to Meta’s company-wide count of 3.60 billion daily active people (June 2026).

Facebook has taken advantage of PHP’s capability to generate dynamic content in mere seconds since its founding in 2004.

At its conception, the entire core Facebook application code was written in PHP by both Zuckerberg and Moskowitz. This led to a domino effect, and now a large pool of present-day tech companies use PHP as well.

Facebook introduced HipHop for PHP (HPHPc) in 2010, a transpiler that translates source code into source code of another language.

In HipHop for PHP, input PHP code is translated to C++ and then compiled into a binary for execution.

Eventually, HipHop for PHP was discontinued and replaced by the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) in 2013.

This drastically improved performance and facilitated easier development and deployment processes.

Today, Facebook runs Hack, a PHP-derived language, on HHVM. HHVM 4.0 (February 2019) dropped PHP support entirely, so the company no longer runs PHP itself, although its codebase grew directly out of it.

2. Wikipedia

Wikipedia is perhaps one of the most visited public information sites that uses PHP as a programming language, along with MySQL/MariaDB as its database backend.

Comparable to Facebook, in 2014, they switched to HHVM, which Wikimedia and Facebook engineers clocked at roughly twice as fast for editors, with HHVM’s median page-save time landing at about 45% of what it took under plain PHP.

When HHVM dropped PHP support, Wikimedia moved Wikipedia back to standard PHP 7 in 2019. W3Techs still detects PHP on Wikipedia.org (October 2026), which makes it one of the busiest PHP applications on the web.

3. Tumblr

The birthplace of memes, Tumblr hosts more than half a billion blogs, by Automattic’s own count.

In 2016, Tumblr transitioned to PHP7, noting dramatic performance upticks and new language features that they’re now able to implement, including scalar type hints and return type declarations.

In 2024, Automattic, which owns Tumblr, announced plans to move its backend onto WordPress, which also runs on PHP, but it put that migration on hold indefinitely in mid-2025 (TechCrunch).

4. Slack

Slack launched in 2014 on a PHP 5 backend, and Salesforce bought the company for $27.7 billion in 2021.

Slack started on PHP, switched to HHVM in 2016, and then moved its backend to Hack, a change that meant removing every last line of PHP from the codebase. (Slack Engineering)

Slack’s last official daily-user count, 12 million, dates from October 2019; the larger figures quoted since are third-party estimates. Its history makes a useful case study in what PHP can carry, and in why a team might eventually outgrow it.

5. MailChimp

It’s no wonder that one of the primary leaders in the email marketing industry uses scalable PHP databases in its backend.

Intuit bought Mailchimp in 2021 for about $12 billion, and Intuit’s Mailchimp engineering job listings still name PHP among the backend technologies, alongside Java and Kotlin.

6. Etsy

Etsy has gained ground as one of the most popular retail PHP websites in the US, with about 87 million active buyers (Etsy Q2 2026 shareholder letter).

This establishes Etsy as one of the largest e-commerce sites built on PHP. Etsy’s own job listings still describe its stack as primarily PHP and JavaScript, plus Go and Java.

They actually documented their experimentation with HHVM for webpage performance optimizations.

Etsy engineers, including PHP’s creator Rasmus Lerdorf, also built Phan, a static analyzer for PHP that now supports PHP 8 and has outside maintainers.

7. WordPress

Ultimately, it’s no surprise that the most extensive content management system uses PHP to interact with databases and fetch data.

In short, PHP is used to fetch key components from the database and output them as static HTML.

This allows millions of active daily users to create/use templates, as well as drag/drop website UI components, with little to no coding experience.

WordPress now runs on 40.1% of all websites, and 58.6% of those with a known CMS (W3Techs, October 2026), which cements PHP’s dominance in the CMS market.

8. Mollie

Mollie, a European payment service provider that serves more than 250,000 businesses, runs core payment systems on PHP.

Its engineering job listings describe a backend built on PHP with Symfony and MySQL behind a React front end, and say the company comes from a monolithic background with core systems written in PHP and Java.

Mollie also maintains an official Laravel package, so merchants can take payments from a Laravel app with a few lines of code.

PHP rarely anchors a ledger at a newer fintech, where Go and Java tend to win, but payment providers that began in the 2000s often kept PHP at the center.

9. Flickr

Flickr launched in 2004 on PHP and the LAMP stack, and a backend engineering listing from its current owner, SmugMug, still describes writing “non-framework PHP” while the team moved the site from its own data centers to AWS.

It remains a clear case of PHP running a media-heavy site that handles millions of photo uploads, using plain PHP with no framework layer.

10. Upwork

Upwork, the freelancing marketplace, has described its web layer as Symfony (PHP) and Angular in front of JVM services, a setup its CTO outlined in a 2017 engineering post.

The middle tier moved from Perl to Java-based services, and its current backend roles ask for Java and Kotlin, so at Upwork PHP appears to sit closer to the front end than the core. That is a fair reminder that “uses PHP” covers a wide range of roles.

Conclusion

PHP’s dynamic nature as a scripting language has allowed companies to save hours of lost daily time, allowing them to maximize long-term ROI.

With the recent rise of PHP8+ and its consistent popularity as a server-side language amongst top tech and retail companies, one thing is abundantly clear:

PHP should be seriously considered by business and software development teams.

Regardless of how these ten companies employed PHP in their dev stack, they ensured that top-level talent got the job done.

At Trio, our senior PHP developers possess the technical intuition to build dynamic server-side backends for your web and mobile products.

Reach out to us today and learn more about how to hire a PHP developer with Trio through staff augmentation with senior Latin American developers.

Request a consult.