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Discussion on: Imposter Syndrome: PHP Edition

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vinaypai profile image
Vinay Pai • Edited

Whenever people talk down about PHP, I tend to remind them that it's used in over 75% of the web.

According to whom, exactly? People have been repeating this exact claim for years now, but I can't find a single article that actually cites a reliable source. Remarkably that exact 75% figure goes back to at least 2011. Have people been using the same technologies for 6-7 years now?

The only citation I've found is "w3techs" which seems pretty flawed. Their naive stats don't seem to take site popularity into account at all and are probably skewed by vast numbers of WordPress installations and parked pages.

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martyhimmel profile image
Martin Himmel

75% was just the first article I pulled up (linked above). Intermittent searches over the last couple years have pulled up similar numbers, usually either 75% or 80%. Realistically, I don't think it's possible to know a hard number. Much like surveys, they only poll a small percentage of a given demographic and base the statistics on that.

WordPress definitely makes up a good portion of that. They claim to power 29% of the internet right on their homepage. To be fair, WordPress is used for a lot of business applications, so there is some development going on there.