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WordPress が古い PHP を存続させているとして非難される. 数字は逆を物語る. レポートする WordPress インストール全体, 76.7% PHPを実行する 8, に対して 63.3% PHP Web 全体の. That is a 13.4-point lead for the platform people call a legacy drag. PHP turned 31 6月に 2026, counting from Rasmus Lerdorf’s first public release in 1995. Its share of the server-side web dropped 3.5 points in the last twelve months, and WordPress is still built on it end to end.
簡単な回答: WordPress runs on PHP because every theme, すべてのプラグイン, and every page render is PHP code. Change the language and the 66,979 plugins in the official directory stop working. PHP is not going anywhere either. Eleven developers are now paid to maintain it, through a foundation that Automattic helped start. Put your site on PHP 8.4 and stop worrying about the language.
最終レビュー済み: 8月 2026. Version support dates read from php.net, install distributions pulled live from the WordPress.org stats API, market share from W3Techs surveys dated 30 8月 2026.
How This Article Was Checked
Four source types decided what made it in here, and two things were deliberately left out.
Version support dates come from php.net’s own release calendar, read on 31 8月 2026, not from a summary of it. Install distributions come from the public WordPress.org stats API. It returns a raw percentage for every PHP version reporting in, and every distribution figure below was calculated from that payload directly. The plugin count came from the WordPress.org plugin API on the same day. Market share comes from W3Techs surveys dated 30 8月 2026. Performance claims are attributed to the people who ran the load tests, because no load testing was run for this article.
What got excluded: any benchmark that didn’t publish its methodology, そして任意 “PHP 8.5 は 20% もっと早く” claim without a test harness behind it. Several such claims are circulating, and the two benchmarks that do publish their setup both contradict them for standard WordPress. Vendor blog posts were used only for dates the vendor itself controls, like a hosting company announcing which PHP version it turned on.
2 つの正直な制限. The WordPress.org stats API samples sites that phone home, so it is not a census of every install on earth. And W3Techs crawls a fixed set of top sites, which means the 76.7% WordPress figure and the 63.3% all-PHP figure come from different sampling frames. They point the same direction, but don’t read the 13.4-point gap as a precise measurement.
PHP’s Real Position in 2026
Start with the decline, because it’s real and most PHP defenders skip it. W3Techs put PHP at 73.7% of sites with a known server-side language in August 2025. の上 30 8月 2026 the same survey showed 70.2%. それは 3.5 points in twelve months, and it’s the steepest year-over-year drop in the series. W3Techs puts PHP’s peak at 80.6% 戻る 2015. So the language has shed roughly 10 points in eleven years, which averages under a point a year. The last twelve months ran close to four times that rate.
So PHP is losing ground faster than it used to. Now the part that puts the number in proportion.
The second-place server-side language in that same survey is JavaScript, で 7.2%. Ruby sits at 7.0%, Java at 5.5%, Python at 1.2%. PHP’s share is roughly ten times the runner-up’s. Shedding 3.5 points a year from 70% buys about eighteen years before PHP even reaches where JavaScript is today. That assumes the decline stays linear, which nothing in software ever does.
The version picture matters more than the headline share anyway. Among all sites running PHP, 63.3% are on PHP 8, 28.7% are still on PHP 7, と 7.9% PHPを実行する 5. Compare that to WordPress specifically, where the stats API puts PHP 8 adoption at 76.7%. PHP 8.3 と 8.2 alone account for just under half of all WordPress installs, で 25.0% と 24.8%.
Why does WordPress run ahead? Two mechanisms, and neither is an accident. The first is that WordPress ships a dashboard notice telling ordinary site owners their PHP is out of date. Frameworks rarely do that, because their users are developers who are assumed to know. The second is that WordPress hosting is a competitive retail market, and the PHP version selector is a feature hosts advertise. A Laravel app on a self-managed box has nobody nagging it. So the platform most often accused of holding PHP back is, on the numbers either side can actually cite, dragging it forward.
What WordPress Actually Uses PHP For
Here’s the thing people miss when they picture WordPress as “a PHP app.” PHP isn’t one layer of WordPress. It’s the layer everything else attaches to.
Load any page on a standard WordPress site. Before a byte reaches the browser, PHP has already done all of this:
- Parsed the URL into a database query
- Built and run the SQL against MySQL or MariaDB
- Checked the current user’s capabilities
- Loaded the active theme’s template files
- Fired the hooks that let plugins interrupt any of those steps
Themes are PHP templates. The REST API that the block editor talks to is PHP endpoints. Dynamic blocks, the ones whose output changes per request, render in PHP on the server.
That hook system is the reason a rewrite is off the table. WordPress plugins don’t call a documented API from outside. They register callbacks that run 中身 core’s execution, at named points, with core’s own data structures passed to them. The WordPress.org plugin API returned 66,979 published plugins の上 31 8月 2026. Every one of them is written against that contract. Swap the language and you don’t port WordPress. You abandon the ecosystem that makes WordPress worth using.
Backwards compatibility is the other half of it. Core treats not breaking existing sites as close to an absolute rule. Themes and plugins written well over a decade ago can still run on current releases. That commitment cuts both ways. It’s why the platform can’t drop PHP. It’s also why WordPress raises its minimum PHP version so cautiously, を使って 5% usage threshold before retiring a branch. WordPressの場合 7.0 dropped PHP 7.2 と 7.3 in May 2026, combined usage of those two had already fallen to 3.85%.
The JavaScript Question: Is WordPress Leaving PHP?
This is the misconception worth clearing up. 半分の “WordPress is abandoning PHP” posts online read one true fact and draw the wrong conclusion from it.
The true fact: ほとんど 新しい code written for WordPress core is JavaScript. The block editor is React. So is the site editor, and so is the command palette. Measure by lines of code committed this year and JavaScript wins easily.
The wrong conclusion: that PHP is being replaced. What actually happened is narrower. WordPress grew a JavaScript editing layer on top of a PHP application, and the two talk over a PHP-rendered REST API. Save a post and a JavaScript client sends JSON to a PHP endpoint. That endpoint validates it in PHP and writes it with PHP database calls. When a visitor loads that post, PHP renders it. The editor’s React never loads for your visitors at all. Some interactive blocks do ship their own front-end JavaScript, but the page they enhance was built by PHP first.
Newer core features made the PHP side busier, not lighter. The Block Bindings API, which connects block attributes to dynamic data sources, is registered and resolved in PHP. Server-side rendered blocks are a PHP callback by definition. The Abilities API arrived in WordPress 6.9 with a PHP registration function, wp_register_ability(). The AI Client that shipped in WordPress 7.0 is a PHP function too, wp_ai_client_prompt(). Any plugin can call it to reach a configured AI provider.
WordPress 7.0 did add a JavaScript client for those abilities, which is the pattern in miniature. The registry stays in PHP. A JavaScript layer gets bolted on so the browser can reach it.
What did change is the job description. A WordPress developer in 2026 needs both, and the JavaScript half has grown much faster than the PHP half. That’s a real shift in what you hire for. It just isn’t the same thing as the platform changing languages.
Who Pays for PHP Now (And Why It Matters to You)
For most of its life PHP had a funding problem that almost nobody outside the core team could see. It was maintained largely by volunteers plus a handful of people whose employers tolerated the work. That model came apart in 2021 when Nikita Popov, who had driven much of PHP 7.4, 8.0 と 8.1, moved his focus to LLVM. The language briefly had no clear answer to who would do the deep engine work.
The PHP Foundation was announced on 22 11月 2021 in response. One name on the founding member list should jump out at WordPress users: 自動. It signed on alongside JetBrains, ララベル, アクイア, ゼンド, Symfony, PrestaShop, クラフトCMS, Tideways and Private Packagist. The company behind WordPress.com and WooCommerce put money into keeping PHP staffed. That tells you what it thinks the odds of a language migration are.
Where that stands now: 現在 1 1月 2026, eleven Foundation developers work on PHP in part-time and full-time roles. team.blue, the European hosting group behind dozens of consumer hosting brands, became a Gold Sponsor of the PHP Foundation in January 2026. The PHP Foundation then announced an Ecosystem Security Team on 18 5月 2026, funded by a grant from Alpha-Omega. That’s the OpenSSF fund backed by Google, Microsoft and AWS. A dedicated full-time security engineer role came with it.
Why should a site owner care about org charts? Because the honest risk with a 31-year-old language was never that it becomes unfashionable. It’s that the two people who understand the memory allocator retire and nobody replaces them. That’s the failure mode that kills infrastructure software, and it’s the one thing the Foundation exists to prevent. In four years PHP went from a handful of individually sponsored contributors to eleven collectively funded ones. It did that while its market share was falling. Those two facts sit oddly together, and the staffing one is the better predictor.
One more signal, 見逃しやすい. On PHP’s thirtieth birthday, 8 六月 2025, FrankenPHP was adopted into the official PHP organisation on GitHub. It’s a modern application server that runs PHP as a long-lived process instead of spawning one per request. Projects winding down don’t adopt new runtimes on their anniversary.
Does a Newer PHP Make WordPress Faster?
Mostly no, and the exception is specific enough to be worth knowing.
Two independent benchmarks published their WordPress numbers in late 2025, and they agree. タイドウェイズ, the PHP profiling company, tested WordPress 6.8.3 on an 8-core AMD server with JIT (just-in-time compilation, PHP’s optional native-code compiler) switched off. Across PHP 8.2 を通して 8.5 it found no meaningful movement in response times. Only PHP 7.4 lagged, by around 5% on requests per second under concurrent load. Kinsta’s Docker-based test on WordPress 6.8.0 landed in the same place. It recorded 148.22 1秒あたりのリクエスト数 on PHP 8.4 に対して 148.30 の上 8.5. That’s a difference of 0.05%, which is noise.
Against PHP 7.4 the same test showed 139.06 1秒あたりのリクエスト数, so moving off 7.4 buys about 6.6%. 本物, but not the transformation some upgrade guides promise. If a page tells you a version bump makes WordPress 20% もっと早く, ask to see the harness.
Now the exception, そしてそれは大きなものです. Kinsta ran WooCommerce through the same rig and got a completely different shape. WooCommerce managed 53.37 requests per second on PHP 8.4 と 71.02 on PHP 8.5. それは 33% jump from the exact upgrade that did nothing for a plain WordPress site. Measured against PHP 7.4’s 44.20, PHP 8.5 雑に扱う 61% more WooCommerce requests.
Measurement and explanation, kept separate. What the numbers show is that a store workload responds to the 8.4-to-8.5 upgrade and a blog workload does not. Why it happens is a guess, not a tested finding. WooCommerce executes far more PHP per request than a cached blog page, so engine-level improvements have more code to act on. That explanation fits the data. Nobody has isolated it in a controlled test, so treat it as a hypothesis.
The practical read: if you run a content site, pick your PHP version on support dates, スピードではない. If you run a WooCommerce store, test PHP 8.5 on staging with your own checkout flow. The upside is large enough to measure on your own traffic.
PHP Where There Is No Server at All
One development from the last two years does more to answer “will PHP survive” than any market-share chart. WordPress Playground runs a complete WordPress site inside a browser tab, with no server, no host, and no database in the usual sense.
It works by compiling the PHP interpreter itself to WebAssembly, a binary format browsers execute directly. SQLite gets compiled the same way to stand in for MySQL. Your browser downloads a PHP runtime once, then executes WordPress locally. その後, nothing round-trips to a server. People use it for plugin demos, theme previews, bug reproduction, and teaching, all without provisioning anything.
The project ships php-wasm builds for every PHP version from 7.4 を通して 8.5. 1月に 2026 it split those into separate modular packages, so a page only downloads the runtime it needs. There are even PHP 5.2.17 WebAssembly builds, which exist so people can reproduce ancient bugs.
Think about what that implies. A project whose main product is a CMS ported PHP to a runtime that didn’t exist when PHP was written. The result is WordPress running in places PHP was never designed to reach. Languages in real decline don’t pick up new execution targets.
What This Means When You’re Picking a Host
All of the above collapses into two questions for a hosting company. How fast do you ship new PHP versions? And can I pick mine? Here’s how that plays out at different sizes.
店, 200+ 毎日の注文. You need a host offering PHP 8.5 今日, plus staging to test it on. The benchmark gap above is worth real money at that order volume. Payment and shipping extensions also drop old PHP support faster than WooCommerce core does. ホークホスト, 一つのために, turned on PHP 8.5 共有全体にわたって, reseller and semi-dedicated plans in January 2026. That was about seven weeks after the upstream release, and it’s the response time to look for. Skip any host still capping you at PHP 8.2, which loses even security fixes on 31 12月 2026.
予算は米ドル未満 5 月. For a blog or a brochure site, PHP 8.4 on decent 共有ホスティング is the whole requirement. Don’t pay a premium for 8.5 you won’t measure. The gap on a content site is 0.05% (which is to say your visitors will never find it). Do check that the control panel exposes a PHP version selector. Some budget hosts pin one version per server, and then your only upgrade path is a migration.
エージェンシー, 20+ クライアントサイト. Per-site PHP version control decides this one, 生のスペックではない. Sooner or later one client runs a legacy plugin that breaks on 8.4 while everyone else should be current. Managed WordPress hosting usually handles version rollouts for you. That’s a benefit until the day you need one site held back, so read the fine print before committing a portfolio.
A specific PHP extension. Shared hosting will not do this, whatever the sales page says. 必要です VPS where you control the PHP build directly. That’s also the route if you want to experiment with JIT or an alternative runtime. Shared hosts expose neither.
One more thing to check, since it costs nothing. If your dashboard is showing a PHP notice right now, the fix lives in your hosting control panel and not in WordPress. No plugin can change your PHP version, whatever the plugin directory suggests.
よくある質問
Is PHP dying in 2026?
いいえ, though the decline is real. PHP fell from 73.7% に 70.2% of sites with a known server-side language between August 2025 and August 2026, its steepest twelve-month drop on record. But the second-place language, JavaScript, に座っています 7.2%. PHP would need roughly eighteen years at the current rate to fall to where its nearest rival is now.
Why does WordPress use PHP instead of JavaScript?
Because switching would break every plugin and theme ever written for it. WordPress plugins register callbacks that execute inside core’s own PHP process, so they can’t be ported the way an external API client could. ほぼ 67,000 plugins in the official directory, the ecosystem is the product. WordPress did add JavaScript for the block editor, but that runs on top of the PHP application rather than replacing it.
Do I need to know PHP to use WordPress?
To run a site, 番号. 出版, プラグインのインストール, and editing with the block editor need no code at all. You’ll want PHP once you start customising a theme’s template files, writing a child theme function, or building anything with hooks. For most site owners that moment never arrives.
Is PHP 8.5 よりも速い 8.4 WooCommerce用?
Kinsta’s December 2025 benchmark says yes, and by a lot: 71.02 requests per second on PHP 8.5 に対して 53.37 の上 8.4, a 33% gain. The same test showed almost no difference for a standard WordPress site, で 148.30 対 148.22. So the answer depends entirely on whether you run a store. Test it on staging with your own checkout before switching production.
Which PHP versions does WordPress 7.1 サポート?
WordPress 7.1, 解放された 19 8月 2026, runs on PHP 7.4 を通して 8.5. The official minimum is PHP 7.4 and the recommended version is PHP 8.3. WordPress 7.0 dropped PHP 7.2 と 7.3 when it shipped on 20 5月 2026, so sites on those branches cannot install either release.
Can WordPress run without a server?
はい, through WordPress Playground, which compiles PHP to WebAssembly and runs a full WordPress install inside your browser. It ships runtimes for PHP 7.4 を通して 8.5 and uses SQLite instead of MySQL. It’s built for demos, testing and teaching rather than live sites, since nothing persists outside your browser session.
結論
PHP’s market share is falling and its future is more secure than it has been in a decade. どちらも真実です, and the second one matters more if you own a WordPress site. Eleven paid maintainers, a security team funded since May 2026, and Automattic among the founding sponsors add up to a succession plan. That was the actual risk, not the popularity chart.
For your own site the decision is small. 走る PHP 8.4 unless you have a reason not to. It holds security support until 31 12月 2028, and plugin authors have had nearly two years to test against it. Move to 8.5 if you run WooCommerce and can test it first. Get off anything below 8.2 今. And don’t let a quiet dashboard convince you that you’re current, because WordPress’s own version check is more forgiving than php.net’s calendar.
If you’re weighing where to put a WordPress site next, a few related guides pick up where this one stops. 私たちの WordPress versus website builders comparison covers what you trade away by leaving the PHP ecosystem for a hosted builder. The PHP version warning guide is the practical companion to this piece if your dashboard is already nagging you. And for store owners, 私たちの WooCommerce hosting comparison covers the providers that keep pace with PHP releases fastest. The benchmark numbers above suggest that matters more for stores than anyone realised.