PHP development

For a large share of business software, yes, and the version matters more than the language. Modern PHP 8.x is fast, strictly typed where you want it to be, and carries the two most mature commerce platforms in the world along with the most widely deployed CMS. Where it is a poor fit is real-time systems with persistent connections and heavy concurrent workloads: that is a Node or Go conversation, and we would say so. The usual reason to move off PHP is a genuine architectural constraint, not that the language feels unfashionable.

Urgent if you are past end of security support, because you are no longer receiving patches and any vulnerability disclosed after that date stays open on your server permanently. The upgrade is rarely one step: it is a chain of dependency bumps where each one moves something else, and the work scales with how far behind you are and how much of the codebase is covered by tests. Two versions behind is routine maintenance. Six is a project, and it should be planned as one.

Yes, and it is a large share of what we do. A takeover starts with an assessment rather than a rebuild: get it running locally, find every system that writes to its database, establish honest test coverage, and identify the parts nobody can touch safely. Until those four things are known, no decision about the codebase can be costed. We have written up what the first two weeks look like.

Improve it, far more often than people expect. A rewrite restarts the clock on every bug the current system has already found and fixed, and it is usually reached for because the code is unfamiliar rather than because the architecture is wrong. Rewrite when the constraint is structural: the data model cannot express what the business now does, or the framework is unsupported and cannot be upgraded. Not because the code is ugly.

Laravel for most new work, because the ecosystem and the hiring pool are both strong, and because it gives a team conventions rather than a house style nobody else can read. But a great deal of PHP we support is not Laravel: Magento and Adobe Commerce are PHP, WordPress is PHP, and plenty of business-critical applications are framework-free code written years ago that works. We support all of it.

Hire if the work is continuous and you can keep someone busy and learning: a permanent developer who knows your business is worth more than an agency over the long run. Use an agency when the work is bursty, when you need several skills at once, or when nobody in-house can review the code being written. The arrangement we most often recommend is neither: one in-house developer who owns the system, with us alongside for the hard parts and the peaks.