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Top 10 Global PHP Website Examples
PHP (Server-side Scripting Language) is one of the popular choices for developers to nail their web development projects. It has only grown since its invention, and developers were thriving to step up from the static HTML web pages.
In 1995, PHP’s first version, 1.0, was released, involving support for interaction with the database. Well, it was just a start! It got further enhanced; developers reworked, rewrote the code, and made it more modular by adding support for object-oriented programming. It grew even further with more session support, output buffering, Zend Engine, and SimpleXML extensions.
For instance, some popular content management systems used it – WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. Since the evolution of PHP, it has continued to make an impact, paving its way for website development. In turn, the number of organizations using PHP websites has been increasing every day.
In the advent of growth, its 8.1 version grabbed user attention and was used in almost 77.5% of websites worldwide. Let’s dig deeper!
Table of Contents
What is PHP?
PHP – Hypertext Processor is a server-side programming language widely utilized for web development. It is one of the most popular choices by developers because of the following reasons:
- Easily interacts with databases
- Builds dynamic web pages
- Performs server-side tasks
- Highly compatible
All operating systems such as Unix, Linux, Windows, and Mac supports PHP.
It was brought to life by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 to track visitors on his website. Hence he created a collection of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts – PHP.
He named these scripts “Personal Home Page Tools” at first and later renamed them in 1995 as “PHP/FI (PHP/FastCGI)” for the public.
Also read: How To Become A Fullstack Developer
The early versions only took care of form processing and data display, but later, as PHP gained popularity, it was suitable to support complex web applications. Various developers rewrote the language (PHP/FI) in 1997 – Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski and versioned it as 3.0. Its mature interface could handle multiple databases, protocols, and APIs. And it became a massive success.
A new version 5.0 was launched in 2004, with improved object-oriented programming and error handling. Each release offered top-end features of its time.
Today, it is one of the widely used programming languages. In 2020, its latest version was released – 8.0 with new features and improvements such as JIT (Just-In-Time), Union Types, Named Arguments, and Attributes – to add metadata to classes, methods, and functions, Match Expressions, Constructor Property Promotion, and Nullsafe Operator. PHP became faster, easier, and top-end.
Why is PHP an ideal choice for Web Development?
PHP, a server-side scripting language, was designed to create dynamic web pages and applications. It is India’s 2nd most popular website in the framework category. Let’s dig deeper and understand why web developers prefer creating PHP websites:
Fast and Efficient
PHP runs on the server, which makes it one of the faster and more efficient languages than others. Its code gets converted into machine code, which makes it more familiar for the server to understand than languages like JavaScript. It has a low overhead memory, which requires minimal memory to run.
Also read: Why Should Developer Take Skill Assessment Tests?
Cross-Platform Compatibility
PHP’s compatibility makes it one of the most rewarded and usable languages. It can work with various operating systems – Windows, Linux, Variants of Unix, and macOS. This cross-platform functionality can help develop web applications on different platforms. Being a server-side language, it supports many web servers, such as Apache, NGINX, and IIS.
Easy to Learn and Use
It is one of the popular choices for beginners who are familiar with C or Java. It works on a simple syntax, which makes it easy to understand and use. Anyone willing to learn PHP can pave their way through free tutorials, documentation, and forums.
Extensive Community
There are extensive third-party libraries available online that developers can refer to, once when familiar with the language. This community ensures that any or every piece of information online is up-to-date with the latest web development trends to help developers worldwide.
Also read: 15 Best Communities That Every Developer Should Join
Manageable Resources
PHP has built-in frameworks and libraries to support the development process whenever required. Apart from that, it is an open-source language that is free to use, making it one of the cost-effective choices for businesses or users.
Flexible and Scalable
Languages can get complex even for developers, but with PHP, they can build small scripts and enterprise-level web applications. Plus, it can be integrated with other frameworks and content management systems, making it versatile enough to become a preferred choice for developers.
Scope of PHP
PHP is today’s world language for developers. Why? Its versatility and popularity make it highly accessible for experienced and full-time developers. Below, we have explored some areas where developers can leverage the complete power of PHP:
E-Commerce: This industry is booming globally. Since it caters to various target audiences based on age and occupation. It requires constant updating then and now, therefore, companies prefer building their website using PHP. Here are some of the examples: Magento, WooCommerce, and PrestaShop.
Numerous Databases: PHP, being a server-side programming language, connects to a world of databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle. It can manipulate data just the way a user wants. Hence, its usability extends.
Machine Learning Applications: PHP can integrate with libraries and computing systems such as TensorFlow, PHP-ML, FANN, Neural Networks, etc., to create Machine Learning Applications without any constraints. Apart from its data processing capabilities, you can extract data from databases, CSVs, and APIs and repurpose it to build Machine Learning Applications.
Integration Capabilities: PHP can easily be integrated with other languages such as Python, R, and Java. This makes it accessible for developers – beginners or experienced, to utilize it for web development possibilities.
From large to small-scale projects, the scope of PHP as a preferred website development language is massively wide.
Top 10 PHP Websites
Here are some global organizations who have developed their websites on PHP.
It was a result of an informal discussion between Mark Zuckerberg and his friends in the year 2004. Later, it became one of the most popular social media websites globally. It grew its active user base to 1.49 billion. One of the popular uses of PHP is its dynamic content generation in mere seconds, which helped Facebook achieve massive breakthroughs.
Zuckerberg and Moskowitz wrote its entire code in PHP. And since Facebook was a trendsetter in the programming world, many tech companies started using PHP.
Yahoo
Yahoo search engine is entirely based on PHP. It was created in 1995 and continued serving its users till now. Since it has a massive user base of 7 billion per month, to be precise, PHP could easily handle such a populated audience. It became one of the 6th most visited websites worldwide.
Tumblr
Tumblr is listed among the top 100 most visited websites in the world. The platform enables its users to share posts, stories, images, and text across its user base, and till now, it hasn’t lost its stage. This micro-blogging platform was written in PHP, providing users with a rich interface, usability, and features.
Also read: The Ultimate Guide To Hiring Remote Tech Talent
MailChimp
It’s an email marketing automation platform that was built in the year 2014. It was designed using PHP, and some of its best features accommodated with PHP are Merge Tags, Product Recommendations, Comparison-based data Reports, Advanced Segmentation, Campaign creation and sharing, and email and campaign templates.
Slack
Team communications became smoother with time. Slack was built in 2009 and slowly became one of the go-to apps for managing official communications. It was created using PHP, which helped Slack maximize its user’s workflows, speeding up the web request time and minimizing program defects.
Wikipedia
It is a well-known open-source online encyclopedia that supports articles, user profiles, and whatnot. It was designed using PHP to store unlimited information on its platform globally. Some of the best-known features of Wikipedia that were built using PHP are HTML DocType, User Space, Visual Edits, Viewport Meta Tag, and more.
WordPress
WordPress is one of the best-known content management platforms, built-in 2003. It was designed using PHP and MySQL as a blogging platform that accommodates users with their databases of blogs and articles. It also became one of the well-known tools for designing and managing websites globally. Some of its features, which were made possible using PHP, are as follows: Social Sharing, Auto Upgrade & Support, Accessible Widgets and Plugins, Themes, and a lot more.
Canva
It is a graphic designing website founded in the year 2012. Its simplistic tools and usability make it one of the most popular designing tools for beginners and experts. Its drag-and-drop capabilities make it one of the most fluid websites. The massive success rate was only possible because it was built using PHP.
Some of its top-selling features which make it shine above all are as follows: storage space, more than 8000 templates, image uploads, and free stock resources (photos, videos, illustrations, & templates).
Flickr
It is one of the well-known video hosting service providers. Flickr is a video-sharing platform with a massive user base of almost 90 million monthly. SmugMug later owned it. While developing this website, Nginx, one of the most popular web servers – PHP, was used to sustain the capabilities of such a high-traffic website.
9GAG
They are a Hong-Kong-based social media platform designed especially considering the younger audience. Users can easily share their funny stories, videos, and memes to stay engaged with their user base. 9GAG uses Laravel, a PHP framework because it smooths the development process without sacrificing application functionality.
Also read: OKRs for your Software Development Team
PHP brings a world of new possibilities to its audience. Almost 35,964,928 live sites use PHP as per the historical demographics. Be it developers or clients for whom it is used. Its server-side capabilities make it shine above all the programming languages worldwide. It is efficient and easy, to begin with, for developers who are stepping into the technological world. Apart from that, even the experts recommend PHP as a go-to language.
Are you a web developer looking to explore jobs in PHP? Explore Ellow and connect to the global network within a few clicks. Create your profile and let the top-end companies reach out to you.
Frequently Asked Questions
A PHP developer should have a knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, MySQL, jQuery, and AJAX
The syntax of PHP resembles to C & Perl
Zend PHP Certification is considered being one of the best certification.
Suvankar Das
