How Much of the Internet Runs on PHP

PHP runs a little over two thirds of the websites whose server side language can be identified. Its share has been falling slowly for a decade. For organisations weighing up PHP development for UK organisations, that headline number matters less than what sits underneath it. The figures below show how the share is measured, which versions those websites run and how many of them no longer receive security fixes.

Most of the pages that answer this question quote a figure in the high seventies, often without a date or a source. Those numbers were accurate at one point, but they describe the web of several years ago. Every figure here comes from W3Techs or php.net, linked in the same paragraph and checked against the data as it stood at the start of September 2026.

How Much of the Internet Runs on PHP Today

PHP was used by 70.2% of all websites whose server side programming language W3Techs could identify on 1 September 2026, according to its monthly trends in server side language usage. The same table shows the share at 73.4% on 1 October 2025, so PHP lost a little over three percentage points in eleven months. No other language comes close. JavaScript was second at 7.2% and Ruby third at 7.0%.

The qualifier that matters in that sentence is “whose server side programming language W3Techs could identify”. W3Techs does not claim that seven in ten of every website in existence runs PHP. It reports the share among websites where the language could be detected, which leaves out websites that hide their technology and those where no server side language can be found. Quoting the figure without that qualifier is the most common mistake in the pages currently ranking for this question.

The W3Techs PHP usage page updates daily, so the number on it moves by a fraction of a point from week to week. Its list of popular websites using PHP includes wikipedia.org, wordpress.org and a subdomain of microsoft.com. A fair summary for September 2026 is that around 70% of websites with a known server side language use PHP. The figure is drifting down by two or three points a year.

Why Older Articles Quote a Higher Figure

The 77% to 80% figures still quoted online were correct when they were written. W3Techs’s yearly trend table puts PHP at 80.6% on 1 January 2015, 79.1% on 1 January 2021, 77.7% on 1 January 2023 and 76.7% on 1 January 2024. By 1 January 2026 the figure had fallen to 72.4%. That makes the 79.1% figure, which appears in several of the most visible answers to this question, a 2021 number. The 77.4% figure quoted elsewhere sits between the 2023 and 2024 readings. The quarterly readings below show how steady the decline has been since then.

A drop of six points in under three years is a real trend, but it is a gradual one. PHP has lost share every year in the W3Techs data without any sudden fall, which points to slow change in what new websites are built with rather than existing websites leaving PHP in large numbers.

How W3Techs Measures Server Side Languages

W3Techs measures what it calls the relevant web, a sample of websites with meaningful content or functionality that it describes as well over 20 million websites. Its methodology notes explain that a technology counts as used if it appears on any page of a website, that subdomains are not counted as separate websites and that domains which redirect elsewhere are left out. Websites showing only a default server page and near duplicates of other websites are excluded as well.

Detection works by fetching pages much as a search engine does and looking for patterns in the HTML, headers, cookies, URL structure and DNS records. The W3Techs FAQ also says a fair share of the data comes from dependencies between technologies. If a website is identified as WordPress, it is counted as PHP, because WordPress cannot run without it.

Those limits work in both directions. Websites that deliberately hide their technology will be undercounted, while the WordPress dependency rule makes PHP one of the easiest languages to detect. Neither effect is large enough to change the overall picture, which is that PHP sits far ahead of every other server side language on the public web.

W3Techs does not publish a free breakdown for websites hosted in the UK or using .uk domains. No UK equivalent of the survey has been published either, so the global figure is the most reliable guide available to UK organisations. Given how much of the UK web runs on WordPress and on shared Linux hosting, there is no reason to expect the UK picture to differ much from the global one.

What Is Taking Share From PHP

JavaScript is the language gaining most of the ground PHP has lost. The W3Techs server side language survey reported on 27 July 2026 that JavaScript had become the second most popular server side language on the web, overtaking Ruby. Its share rose from 5.0% in October 2025 to 7.2% by 1 September 2026, as frameworks that render pages on the server with JavaScript have become a common choice for new builds. How those frameworks compare with PHP is covered in PHP, Python or Next.js for a business website.

Hosted website builders account for much of the rest. Websites built on closed hosted platforms do not expose a server side language in the same way, so growth in that part of the market shrinks the pool of websites with a detectable language. None of this amounts to PHP being replaced. The newer stacks are winning a larger share of new projects, while the existing base of PHP websites stays in place and keeps being maintained. The cluster post explaining what PHP is used for covers the kinds of work where PHP remains the default choice.

How Much of the Web Runs on WordPress

WordPress ran 40.7% of all websites on 1 September 2026, according to W3Techs’s content management usage trends. That is a share of every website in the sample, not only those with a known content management system. The same table shows 30.9% of websites using no detectable content management system at all.

Among websites where a content management system can be identified, WordPress held 58.9% on the same date, as the market share trends for content management systems show. The W3Techs WordPress page describes it as an open source publishing and content management system based on PHP. Both WordPress figures have been edging down month by month, in step with PHP.

The link between the two numbers explains most of PHP’s position. Because every WordPress website is a PHP website, WordPress alone accounts for a large majority of PHP’s share. Anyone asking how much of the internet runs on PHP is mostly asking how much of it runs on WordPress, which is why the case for WordPress as a business platform and the health of PHP are so closely tied.

Why PHP Keeps Its Lead

PHP keeps its lead mainly because WordPress keeps its lead. W3Techs’s breakdown of content management systems among PHP websites shows that more than four in five PHP websites with a known content management system run WordPress. As long as WordPress remains the default choice for company websites, PHP’s share will stay far above any other server side language.

Hosting is the second reason. PHP runs on almost every Linux hosting account, from basic shared plans to managed WordPress platforms, with no extra setup. A business can move a PHP website between hosts with relatively little work, which is not always true of applications built on newer stacks that expect a particular cloud platform.

The third reason is the release cycle. PHP ships a new branch every year and supports each one for four years, so organisations can plan upgrades well ahead rather than reacting to sudden changes. The language has also changed a great deal since version 5, with large performance gains in version 7 and stricter typing in version 8, which has kept it competitive for new projects as well as existing ones. That is a large part of why PHP is still relevant for business websites.

Big Platforms Built on PHP

Several of the largest platforms on the web are built in PHP. The three below account for a large part of PHP’s footprint, from the content management system behind most PHP websites to one of the most visited reference websites in the world.

WooCommerce is the clearest example of PHP’s reach inside WordPress. W3Techs’s WordPress subtechnology trends show it on 19.8% of WordPress websites on 1 September 2026. MediaWiki lists PHP among its installation requirements, alongside a web server and a database.

Which PHP Versions Websites Run

Version 8 was used by 63.3% of PHP websites on 1 September 2026, according to W3Techs’s PHP version trends. Version 7 still accounted for 28.7%, version 5 for 7.9% and version 4 for 0.1%. Version 8 has gained about a point a month for the past year, up from 51.3% in October 2025.

Version 8 is itself split into branches. Those branches matter more than the major version for security. W3Techs keeps a separate page for PHP version 8. Its subversion trends put PHP 8.3 at 33.2% of version 8 websites on 1 September 2026, PHP 8.2 at 29.4%, PHP 8.1 at 16.6%, PHP 8.4 at 11.4%, PHP 8.0 at 6.4% and PHP 8.5 at 3.0%. The table below sets each branch against the support dates published by the PHP project.

Support dates come from the PHP project’s supported versions page. Each branch gets two years of active support, with bug and security fixes, followed by two years of fixes for critical security issues only. After that it reaches end of life and receives nothing further. The guide to PHP versions explained sets out which branch a website should run.

How Many PHP Websites Run Unsupported Versions

About half of all PHP websites were running a version of PHP that no longer received security fixes in September 2026. Every branch of version 7 and version 5 is past end of life, with PHP 7.4, the last of the version 7 line, reaching it on 28 November 2022 according to the PHP project’s list of unsupported branches. That covers 36.7% of PHP websites before version 8 is counted, using the W3Techs version figures above. PHP 8.0 and 8.1 add to that total. Together they made up 23% of version 8 websites on 1 September, which works out to a further 14.6% of all PHP websites on unsupported branches. Added to the version 7 and version 5 share, that puts the total a little above half. The calculation uses W3Techs figures throughout, so it carries the same limits as the survey itself.

The number will grow at the end of the year unless upgrades speed up. PHP 8.2, used by 29.4% of version 8 websites in the subversion figures above, stops receiving security fixes on 31 December 2026. WordPress’s hosting requirements recommend PHP 8.3 or greater and warn that older versions which have reached end of life may expose a website to security vulnerabilities. The practical side of that is covered in WordPress PHP version compatibility.

An unsupported PHP version does not mean a website has been compromised. It means any new flaw found in that branch will not be fixed, so the website depends on its host or its own team to patch around problems that the PHP project no longer addresses. Outdated server software is one of the routes covered in how WordPress websites get compromised, alongside plugins and weak logins. The wider picture is set out in the guide to running an end of life PHP version.

How to Check Which PHP Version a Website Runs

The quickest way to check a website’s PHP version is through its own admin area or hosting account, since the version is rarely visible from outside. The PHP manual’s page on hiding PHP explains that the expose_php setting can be switched off so the version is not sent in response headers. Many hosts switch it off, which makes outside checks unreliable.

Changing the version is a separate job from checking it. Plugins, themes and custom code all need testing against the new branch before the switch. The server itself has to meet the other requirements set out in WordPress server requirements.

For websites that do not run WordPress, the signs of PHP from the outside are file names ending in .php, cookie names such as PHPSESSID and a response header naming PHP. Their absence does not rule PHP out, for the reasons the PHP manual sets out on hiding it.

What the Numbers Mean for a Business Website

The size of PHP’s share is the reason it remains a safe choice for a business website. A language that runs most of the measurable web has a large pool of developers, long term support from its maintainers and hosting available almost everywhere. The PHP project has already published its schedule for PHP 8.6, with general availability planned for 19 November 2026 on the PHP 8.6 release timetable, so the language continues to move forward on a predictable yearly cycle. The guide to what is changing in PHP 8.6 covers the release itself.

The version data is the part that should prompt action. A website built well in PHP can still be exposed if it sits on a branch that stopped receiving fixes years ago. The W3Techs figures suggest that applies to about half of PHP websites. Checking the version and planning upgrades against the published support dates removes most of that risk. Websites on PHP 8.3 have a little longer, as the guide to when PHP 8.3 reaches end of life explains.

Priority Pixels develops websites using a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). Every website is coded in custom HTML5, CSS3 and PHP. PHP version upgrades are part of the WordPress support retainer, alongside managed UK hosting, uptime monitoring, security hardening and malware scanning. More detail on the build side is on the web development service page.