PHP development
Table of contents
What is PHP Development?
The process of making a website or web application using PHP.
PHP, which is a backend language, needs to be used in conjunction with front end technologies such as HTML and CSS and databases such as MySQL.
What is PHP?
PHP is a backend development language. It is open source (free), about 20 years old (stable), easy to learn on your own.
It’s very popular with beginners, entrepreneurs and website developers but isn’t so popular with mobile app developers and some very large scale web development applications.
Popular website using PHP are Facebook, WordPress, MailChimp, Wikipedia.
Why use PHP?
There are much easier ways to make a simple website. WordPress development allows for a faster turnaround.
The reason why you would use PHP as the basis for web development:
You are making a web application
PHP is great a processing data, creating graphs and doing all sorts of complex functions. It’s easy to make a custom application for your business using PHP.
You are making a web portal
If you’re making a website that will have thousands of user generated pages, where content is coming from complex sources that need to be generated on the fly then creating a website in PHP.
PHP is very fast website
PHP websites load quickly and don’t suffer from over bloating that modern website do. This gives you an SEO advantage BUT only if you keep up with SEO optimization. Without it, your website will suffer a low score.
PHP is easy to develop in
If you need to develop, then PHP is easy to learn and easy to find developers at all levels. Provided you have the right team, there is less that can go wrong compared to more complex systems.
PHP vs WordPress
Starfish used to use PHP for all its websites, then it moved to WordPress for most of its corporate websites, ecommerce websites and small business websites.
We still use PHP for our own internal applications and some clients who want something quite unique.
We don’t recommend using PHP just because:
- You want a fast website
- You’re worried about security
- You want full control over your code.
While these are all valid reasons, there are downside to using PHP to make a website namely:
Project complexity
Websites that are handmade need to go through a more rigorous testing and QA process. They need to be planned in more detail too.
Cost
A hand coded website will be 3 times the cost of one made with a platform
Quality of code
There will be more handmade code, giving more chances for errors to appear.
Maintenance
Maintenance is going to be more costly. The onboarding process for developers is longer and you will have to pay them
Complexity of modern websites
Modern website are complicated. This was the main reason why Starfish moved from PHP to WordPress. It’s no longer possible to code efficiently given all the things that you need to consider in a modern website.
