Is PHP outdated? How websites are built in 2026

No. Anyone who says so hasn’t looked closely. PHP runs on 69.1% of all websites whose server-side language is known1W3Techs, 2026Usage Statistics and Market Share of PHP for WebsitesOpen the source. The language is actively developed, and PHP 8 is far more modern than the versions from ten years ago. WordPress, Wikipedia and countless online stores run on it.

The real problem is somewhere else: the version a site runs on. Every PHP version gets two years of full support, then two years of security updates only. After that, nothing2PHP.net, 2026Supported Versions / Unsupported BranchesOpen the source. Right now, only PHP 8.4 and 8.5 are fully supported. PHP 8.1 got its last update on December 31, 2025, and PHP 8.2 gets its last one on December 31, 20262PHP.net, 2026Supported Versions / Unsupported BranchesOpen the source.

A site on an outdated PHP version often works just fine. Until someone finds a vulnerability that no longer gets fixed. It’s like a car that skips its safety inspection: it still drives, but nobody is checking the brakes anymore.

Most websites are still built the way it was done around 2010: a server that assembles the page with PHP on every visit, a theme for the look, plugins for the features and jQuery for anything that moves. It works, but it’s slow and vulnerable. A lot has changed since then.

A modern site flips this around. Pages are built ahead of time or at the edge of the network, close to the visitor. The interface is made of reusable components. The code is typed, so errors get caught before a visitor ever sees them. And the browser does far more on its own than it used to.

In 2006, jQuery was a lifesaver. Every browser did things slightly differently, and jQuery smoothed out those differences. Twenty years later, it’s still on 64.3% of all websites4W3Techs, 2026Usage statistics of jQuery (all versions)Open the source. On mobile pages, it’s still the most used JavaScript library: 74%, compared with 10% for React5HTTP Archive, 2025JavaScript | 2024 | The Web Almanac by HTTP ArchiveOpen the source.

The problem: the browser can now do almost everything jQuery did. So sites often load it for nothing. That fits a bigger pattern: of all the JavaScript an average mobile page loads, about 44% isn’t even used5HTTP Archive, 2025JavaScript | 2024 | The Web Almanac by HTTP ArchiveOpen the source. Every kilobyte you don’t need makes your site slower.

To keep track of what works everywhere, Google introduced Baseline in 2023: a label for features that work in all major browsers. After two and a half years, a feature like that counts as widely available6web.dev, 2023Baseline; Introducing BaselineOpen the source. Browser makers also work together in Interop to iron out the differences. Interop 2025 ended with a score of 95 out of 1007web.dev, 2026Interop 2026: Continuing to improve the web for developers; Launching Interop 2026Open the source.

The result: things that used to need JavaScript, a plugin or a lot of fiddling are now plain CSS:

The way code gets written has changed too. TypeScript is JavaScript with types: the code knows a price is a number and a name is text, and warns you when that’s wrong. So bugs get caught during the build, not by your customers. In Stack Overflow’s Developer Survey, 43.6% of developers use TypeScript, compared with 18.9% for PHP. React is used by 44.7%, jQuery by 23.4%14Stack Overflow, 2025Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025 – TechnologyOpen the source.

Components also make a site more consistent. A button, a pricing block or a form is built once and reused everywhere. Change it, and it changes everywhere at once.

A website used to live on one server in one data center. A visitor on the other side of the world had to wait longer. Now a site can run on a global network. Cloudflare, which we build on, is in more than 330 cities in more than 125 countries15Cloudflare, 2026500 Tbps of capacity: 16 years of scaling our global network; Cloudflare Global NetworkOpen the source. The code runs in lightweight environments that, according to Cloudflare, start up about a hundred times faster than a traditional server in a container16Cloudflare Docs, 2026Cloudflare Workers (docs overview); How Workers worksOpen the source. Your visitor gets the site from the nearest server.

Google measures how fast and stable your site is with the Core Web Vitals: the main content within 2.5 seconds, a response to a click within 200 milliseconds and a page that doesn’t jump around17web.dev, 2020Web Vitals; Interaction to Next Paint (INP)Open the source. Since March 12, 2024, that responsiveness metric, INP, counts instead of the older FID18web.dev, 2024Interaction to Next Paint becomes a Core Web Vital on March 12Open the source. Google itself writes that good Core Web Vitals line up with what its ranking systems aim to reward19Google Search Central, 2025Understanding Core Web Vitals and Google search resultsOpen the source.

Older Google data already pointed the same way: if a mobile page takes 10 seconds to load instead of 1, the chance that a visitor leaves goes up by 123%23Think with Google, 2018Find out how you stack up to new industry benchmarks for mobile page speedOpen the source. Speed is not a technical detail. It decides whether someone stays.

Since June 28, 2025, EU rules have covered the accessibility of things like online stores and online services24Europese Unie (Richtlijn 2019/882), 2019Directive (EU) 2019/882 on the accessibility requirements for products and servicesOpen the source. In the Netherlands, small businesses with fewer than 10 employees and no more than €2 million in annual revenue are exempt25Rijksoverheid, 2025Producten en diensten toegankelijker voor mensen met beperkingOpen the source. There’s work to do: WebAIM found errors on 95.9% of the largest websites, 56 per page on average. The most common one: text with too little contrast26WebAIM, 2026The WebAIM Million – The 2026 report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pagesOpen the source.

The good news: modern technology helps. Build with clean HTML, clear buttons and enough contrast, and you get a site that works better for everyone, including search engines and AI.

Want to know for sure? The free Future-Proof Website Scan checks things like your speed, technology and how easy you are to find, and you get a report within 24 hours.

We build with React, TypeScript and Tailwind, and host on Cloudflare’s network. Pages are rendered on the server, so the text is right there in the HTML for visitors, Google and AI systems. You get an admin area for whatever you want to change, and we keep the technology up to date. Read more about our approach on web development.