71% of the Web Runs on PHP
Not 7%. Not 17%. Seventy-one percent. According to W3Techs, PHP powers 70.8% of all websites with a known server-side programming language. The next closest, Ruby, sits at 6.8%. PHP is bigger than every other server-side language on the list combined, by a factor of ten over the runner-up.
The honest footnote: this number is drifting down. PHP peaked around 83% in 2017 and sat near 79% a couple of years ago. The slide tracks the rise of static sites, SPA architectures, and JavaScript on the server. But "losing share" and "losing relevance" are different claims. A tenth-place language would kill for a decline that leaves it ten times the size of second place.
Source: W3Techs, July 2026
Every time someone tweets "PHP is dead", they're talking about a language that powers more websites than all other server-side languages combined. The data doesn't care about hot takes.