Languages
PHP
PHP quietly runs most of the web, and the PHP of 2026 is nothing like the version that earned its old reputation. We build fast, typed, secure PHP systems and modernise the ones you already depend on.
Overview
PHP is a server-side language built for one job and refined over thirty years to do it well: taking a request, talking to a database, and returning HTML or JSON quickly and cheaply. Since PHP 8.0 it has typed properties, union and intersection types, enums, readonly classes, first-class attributes, and a JIT compiler. Benchmarks that mattered in the PHP 5 era simply no longer hold; PHP 8.x runs the same code several times faster while catching whole classes of bugs at compile time that used to surface in production. It powers roughly three quarters of the sites whose backend is known, from WordPress blogs to Magento storefronts to bespoke Laravel platforms handling millions of requests a day.
At Yarqat we use PHP where it earns its place: content-heavy sites, transactional business applications, admin-facing back offices, and integrations that stitch together payment, CRM and fulfilment systems. We write it strictly typed, run it through static analysis, and deploy it on infrastructure that costs a fraction of the equivalent JVM or .NET footprint. Because we operate what we build, we design for the boring realities of PHP in production: OPcache tuning, PHP-FPM worker sizing, queue workers that do not leak memory, and deploys that do not drop requests. We also do a lot of rescue work, taking neglected PHP codebases and making them safe to change again.
Best for — Content platforms, e-commerce, and business web applications that need to ship fast, host cheaply, and stay maintainable for years.
Why teams choose PHP
Lowest cost to run
PHP hosts everywhere, from a few pounds a month of shared hosting to autoscaling containers. The runtime is lean, deploys are simple, and you are not paying for a heavyweight application server just to serve a request.
Time to first release
Laravel and Symfony ship with routing, ORM, auth, queues, and migrations out of the box. A working, secure application exists in days, not weeks, which means feedback and revenue arrive sooner.
A vast, hireable ecosystem
Packagist has hundreds of thousands of libraries, and PHP engineers are plentiful in every timezone. Your platform will not become an unmaintainable island because one specialist moved on.
Why businesses choose PHP
- You want a maintainable, secure web application in production quickly and without a large upfront platform investment.
- Your hosting and maintenance budget matters, and you would rather spend it on features than on infrastructure.
- You are on WordPress, Drupal, Magento or a bespoke PHP app already and want it improved rather than rewritten from scratch.
- You need a stack you can hire for and hand over, not a niche technology that ties you to a single vendor.
What we build with PHP
The capabilities this technology is genuinely strong at — and what we most often build with it.
Bespoke web applications
Typed, tested Laravel or Symfony applications for portals, dashboards, booking systems and internal tools, built around your domain rather than bent onto an off-the-shelf product.
Server-rendered sites
Fast, SEO-friendly server-side rendering with Blade or Twig, progressively enhanced where it helps. HTML arrives ready to read, which search engines and users both reward.
CMS builds and headless CMS
WordPress and Drupal delivered as clean, maintainable code, either as traditional sites or as a headless content API feeding a React or Vue front end.
E-commerce
Magento and bespoke commerce on Laravel, with payment, tax, inventory and fulfilment integrations wired in and tested against real edge cases like refunds and partial shipments.
APIs and integrations
REST and GraphQL APIs, webhook processing, and the connective tissue between CRMs, ERPs and payment providers, built with proper retries, idempotency and observability.
Legacy rescue and modernisation
Bringing old PHP 5 and early PHP 7 codebases up to 8.x, adding types and tests, replacing dead dependencies, and making a scary codebase safe to change.
Use cases
Membership and subscription platform
A Laravel application handling recurring billing, tiered access, and a member portal, with Stripe integration and a queue-driven email lifecycle that survives traffic spikes.
Multi-editor content site
A Drupal or WordPress build with structured content, editorial workflow, and a headless API, serving both a marketing site and a mobile app from one source of truth.
B2B ordering back office
A Symfony system managing quotes, orders and stock across warehouses, integrating with an accounting package and exposing a secure API to trade customers.
Legacy application rescue
A decade-old bespoke PHP app taken from unversioned, untested and unsafe to a containerised, typed, CI-tested codebase that the team can extend again with confidence.
When PHP is the right choice
- Right when you need a content-driven or transactional web application shipped quickly and hosted affordably, with a huge pool of maintainable code and available engineers behind it.
- Right when a mature framework already solves your problem: Laravel for product velocity, Symfony for long-lived enterprise systems, WordPress or Drupal for editorial and marketing sites.
- Wrong for hard real-time, low-latency streaming, or long-lived stateful connections at scale, where PHP’s request-per-process model fights you and a language like Go or Node fits better.
- Wrong for CPU-bound number crunching, heavy data pipelines, or ML training, where the runtime and ecosystem are not the right tools regardless of the JIT.
PHP: pros and cons
Strengths
- Extraordinary time-to-market with batteries-included frameworks and a package for almost every integration you will ever need.
- Genuinely fast on PHP 8.x: OPcache plus JIT and preloading put it in the same performance conversation as its peers for typical web workloads.
- The cheapest mainstream stack to host and staff, with hosting available literally anywhere and a deep pool of engineers.
- Mature, well-documented frameworks with long-term-support releases, so a system built today has a clear multi-year maintenance path.
Trade-offs
- The shared-nothing, request-per-process model makes true real-time features (websockets, live streams) awkward without extra runtimes like Swoole, ReactPHP or a separate service.
- The language’s history means the ecosystem still contains a lot of dated tutorials and legacy code; without discipline it is easy to inherit or write insecure, untyped spaghetti.
- Async and concurrency are second-class compared to Node or Go; long-running background work needs proper queue workers rather than in-request processing.
- Type safety is opt-in and only enforced at runtime, so the guarantees are weaker than a compiled language unless you enforce strict types and static analysis in CI.
How we structure PHP systems
We build around a clear separation between the framework and your domain. Business rules live in plain, typed PHP classes that do not know or care whether a request came from HTTP, the CLI, or a queue worker; controllers and console commands are thin adapters that call into that core. This keeps the interesting logic testable in isolation and makes framework upgrades far less frightening, because the parts that matter are not tangled into Laravel or Symfony internals.
On top of that we lean on the framework where it is genuinely good: the ORM for persistence, the container for wiring, migrations for schema changes, and the queue for anything slow. We enforce strict types across the codebase and run PHPStan or Psalm at a high level in CI, so a whole category of null and type errors is caught before review. The result is PHP that reads like a well-typed language rather than the loosely-glued scripts the language is unfairly remembered for.
Performance in the real world
The single biggest performance win in PHP is often not the language at all but OPcache and preloading, which keep compiled bytecode resident so each request skips the parse-and-compile step entirely. On PHP 8.x the JIT adds further gains for compute-heavy paths, though for typical database-bound web work the honest truth is that your queries and your caching strategy dominate far more than the interpreter does. We profile with tools like Blackfire or Xdebug rather than guess, and we fix the query doing a thousand round-trips before we reach for the JIT.
Beyond the runtime, we design for the request-per-process model instead of against it: cache aggressively with Redis, offload slow work to queue workers, and keep response handlers lean. PHP-FPM worker counts are sized to the memory the application actually uses, so the server neither starves nor swaps under load. Done properly, a PHP 8.x application comfortably serves the traffic most businesses will ever see on modest, inexpensive infrastructure.
Secure by construction
Most PHP vulnerabilities are the classic web ones, and modern frameworks close them by default: parameterised queries through the ORM stop SQL injection, automatic output escaping in Blade and Twig stops XSS, CSRF tokens are built in, and password hashing uses bcrypt or Argon2 out of the box. The danger is almost always in the code that reaches around the framework, so we keep raw SQL and unescaped output rare, reviewed, and justified. We treat every piece of user input as hostile and validate it at the boundary.
We also take the supply chain seriously. Composer dependencies are pinned and audited, secrets live in the environment rather than the repository, and we keep the PHP version and framework on supported, patched releases. For legacy rescues, a security pass is usually the first order of business: finding the SQL string built from request data, the file upload with no type check, the admin route with no auth, and closing them before anything else.
Scaling PHP
PHP scales horizontally more easily than most stacks precisely because of its shared-nothing model: each request is independent, so you add more PHP-FPM processes or more containers behind a load balancer and capacity grows almost linearly. State lives in the database, Redis, and the session store rather than in the application process, which means any request can be served by any node and rolling deploys are straightforward.
The limits that appear at scale are usually shared: the database, the cache, and slow third-party calls. We plan for those with read replicas, sensible caching layers, and asynchronous processing through queues so a spike in traffic becomes a longer queue rather than a fallen-over site. Where genuine real-time or high-concurrency features are needed, we are honest about reaching for Swoole, a websocket service, or a separate runtime rather than forcing PHP to be something it is not.
PHP integrations & ecosystem
The technologies we most often pair with it — each links to how we work with it.
How we build and hand over
We start narrow and ship early. A thin slice of the real application, deployed to a real environment behind CI, tells us more in a week than a month of planning documents. From there we work in short iterations against a prioritised list, with automated tests and static analysis gating every merge so the codebase stays releasable at all times. Because we run what we build, monitoring, logging and error tracking go in from the first deploy, not bolted on before launch.
Handover is a first-class part of the work, not an afterthought. You get typed, documented code, a reproducible local environment in Docker, a README that actually lets a new engineer run the app, and a deployment pipeline anyone on your team can operate. Our aim is that you are never held hostage: whether we stay involved or you take it in-house, the PHP we leave behind is one your own developers, or any competent PHP team, can pick up and extend.
The service behind it
Delivered throughCustom Software DevelopmentWhat we build with PHP
The disciplines this technology most often shows up in — from a first build to taking over and stabilising an existing one.
How we deliver
- 01
Discover
We map the system, the constraints and the business it serves — including the parts nobody documented.
Architecture brief
- 02
Architect
Decisions get made, written down and defended before a line of production code exists.
Decision records
- 03
Build
Short cycles against working software. You see progress in the product, not in a status deck.
Shipping increments
- 04
Operate
Monitoring, incident response and iteration. The system is alive, so the engagement is too.
Runbooks & SLOs
Industries we use PHP in
Domain knowledge changes what gets built. A few of the sectors we know before the first meeting.
Also in Languages
Why teams choose us for PHP
We operate what we build
This is not throw-it-over-the-wall consultancy. We run PHP in production ourselves, so we design for OPcache, worker sizing, deploys and on-call realities, not just the demo.
Senior-led, no juniors learning on your budget
The people writing your PHP have shipped and rescued serious systems. You get judgement about when PHP is right and, just as importantly, when it is not.
Honest about legacy
We do the unglamorous rescue work well, and we will tell you plainly whether your old codebase should be modernised in place or replaced, rather than selling you the more profitable answer.
Typical timeline
- 01
Discovery and slice
Days one to two weeks: understand the domain, agree the architecture, and ship one thin end-to-end feature to a real environment to prove the pipeline.
- 02
Core build
The bulk of the work: features delivered in short iterations, each tested and behind CI, deployed continuously so you see progress in a running system.
- 03
Hardening
Security review, performance profiling under realistic load, edge-case handling, and observability tuning before anyone relies on it in anger.
- 04
Launch and handover
Go live with monitoring in place, followed by documentation, a clean local setup, and knowledge transfer so your team can own it.
How pricing works
- PHP is one of the most cost-effective stacks to commission and to run, and that shows up at every stage. Framework maturity means we are configuring and composing proven components rather than writing infrastructure from scratch, so more of the budget goes into your actual features. Hosting is cheap and ubiquitous, so ongoing running costs stay low compared with heavier platforms, and the deep talent pool keeps maintenance affordable over the life of the system.
- What actually drives cost is scope and integration complexity, not the language. A brochure-style CMS site is a very different figure from a transactional platform with billing, third-party integrations, and compliance requirements. Legacy rescues are priced by the state of what we inherit; the first thing we do is assess the codebase honestly and tell you whether to modernise incrementally or, occasionally, that a targeted rewrite is the cheaper long-term option.
Hire PHP engineers
Need PHP capacity on your own team? We embed named senior engineers into your existing team — reporting to your leads, working in your rituals — so you add capacity without a hiring cycle.
Hire PHP engineersCommon questions
Isn’t PHP outdated and slow?
That reputation belongs to PHP 5, which is long dead. PHP 8.x is strictly typed where you want it, several times faster thanks to OPcache and the JIT, and underpins a huge share of the modern web. The language you may remember from 2010 and the one we write in 2026 share little beyond the name.
Should I choose Laravel or Symfony?
Laravel favours developer velocity and elegant conventions, which suits products and startups that want to move fast. Symfony is more explicit and component-based, which pays off in large, long-lived enterprise systems with many teams. We are fluent in both and pick based on your longevity, team size and integration needs, not fashion.
Can you rescue our old, undocumented PHP codebase?
Yes, this is a core part of what we do. We start by making it safe: version control, a reproducible environment, a security pass, and a characterisation test around critical paths. Then we modernise incrementally, adding types and tests, so the system stays live and useful while it improves rather than being frozen for a risky big-bang rewrite.
Is PHP secure enough for a business application?
Yes, when built properly. Modern frameworks prevent SQL injection, XSS and CSRF by default, and hash passwords correctly out of the box. The risk lies in code that bypasses those defences, so we keep raw queries and unescaped output rare and reviewed, audit our Composer dependencies, and stay on patched, supported releases.
Can PHP handle real-time features like chat or live updates?
It can, but we are honest that the request-per-process model is not its natural home. For light real-time needs we use polling or a service like Pusher; for heavier concurrency we reach for Swoole, ReactPHP, or a small dedicated websocket service alongside the PHP application, rather than pretending PHP alone is the right tool for everything.
Building on PHP?
A technical conversation with the engineers who would do the work. If we are not the right fit, we will say so on the call.