PHP in 2026: It's Faster Than You Think and Still Runs Half the Web

There is a developer who still believes that PHP is a slow, legacy language held together by duct tape and global variables. This developer has not looked at PHP since 2015. This developer is wrong.

The PHP of 2026 bears approximately the same relationship to PHP 5.6 as a Tesla does to a horse-drawn carriage. The architecture is different. The performance characteristics are different. The capabilities are different. The reputation, unfortunately, remains stubbornly stuck in 2010.

The Modern PHP Stack

PHP 8.0 introduced the JIT (Just-In-Time) compiler. PHP 8.1 through 8.4 refined it. In 2026, PHP 8.4 is the baseline, and the performance improvements are not theoretical.

JIT allows PHP to compile frequently executed code paths to native machine instructions at runtime. This does not make every WordPress page load instantly. It does make CPU-bound workloads image processing, encryption, complex calculations dramatically faster.

More importantly, the opcache system, which has been mature since PHP 7, eliminates the parse-and-compile overhead for every request. Your script is compiled once, stored in shared memory, and executed directly. The "PHP is slow because it recompiles everything every time" argument has been invalid for approximately eight years.

The Runtime Revolution

Traditional PHP ran in a "shared nothing" architecture. Each request started fresh, loaded everything, executed, and died. This was simple but inefficient for real-time applications.

Swoole, RoadRunner, and FrankenPHP have changed this. These application servers keep PHP running in memory between requests. They provide native WebSocket support, coroutines, and async I/O. They allow PHP to compete in domains previously reserved for Node.js and Go.

A Swoole-powered PHP application can maintain persistent database connections, share state across requests, and handle thousands of concurrent connections with minimal memory overhead. This is not a hack. This is a legitimate runtime environment.

The Benchmark Scenario

We ran a controlled test comparing a PHP 8.4 application using Swoole against a Node.js 22 application using Express. Both performed the same tasks:

Parse a JSON request body

Validate the data

Perform three database lookups (simulated with in-memory queries)

Format and return a JSON response

The results, measured in requests per second on identical hardware:

The PHP stack was faster. This is not a typo.

Where PHP Wins in 2026

Database-Backed Applications

PHP's database extensions are mature, well-optimized, and deeply integrated with the language. PDO and mysqli are battle-tested. ORMs like Doctrine and Eloquent are sophisticated. If your workload is "fetch data from database, transform, output HTML or JSON," PHP is optimal.

Development Velocity

A PHP application can be deployed via FTP to a shared hosting environment. It can also be deployed via Kubernetes with auto-scaling. The flexibility is unmatched. Your junior developer can understand the request lifecycle. Your senior developer can implement complex caching strategies. The barrier to entry is low; the ceiling is high.

The Ecosystem

WordPress, Laravel, Symfony, and a thousand other mature projects run on PHP. If your problem has been solved before, the solution probably exists in PHP. This is not exciting. It is practical. Practical pays the bills.

Where PHP Loses

CPU-Intensive Pure Computation

If your workload is video encoding, machine learning inference, or cryptographic hashing at massive scale, PHP is not the optimal choice. C++ or Rust will outperform it. But you probably should not be doing these things in your application layer anyway. Offload them to dedicated services.

Massive Concurrent WebSocket Connections Without Swoole

Vanilla PHP with -enable-sockets is not designed for 100,000 simultaneous WebSocket connections. Swoole handles it. But if you are not using Swoole, and you need that scale, you should evaluate your architecture. Most chat applications do not need that scale.

The Practical Reality

Half the web runs on PHP because PHP works. It is reliable. It is predictable. It is easy to host. It is easy to debug. The performance improvements of the past five years have closed the gap with other languages to the point of irrelevance for most business applications.

Your Website running on PHP 8.4 with opcache enabled, can handle hundreds of concurrent users on a modest VPS. The software is not the bottleneck. The database queries, the network latency, and the client-side rendering are the bottlenecks. PHP is waiting for them.

Conclusion

The next time someone dismisses PHP as a slow, outdated language, ask them when they last used it. The answer will almost certainly be "before JIT." The language evolved. Their opinion did not.

PHP in 2026 is fast enough, mature enough, and productive enough to build anything from a simple blog to a real-time chat platform. It runs half the web. It will continue to run half the web for the foreseeable future.