Technology · PHP
Most of the PHP we look after was not written by us. It arrived as a WordPress install nobody wants to touch, a CodeIgniter application with no tests, a shared-hosting script that broke under load, or a Laravel application that has not been updated since 2021. That work is a real speciality and it is not glamorous.
Engineering rationale
The reasons below are the ones that decide a project. Anything a competitor can say about a framework's features, you can read in their documentation — what is harder to find is why a particular team picks it for a particular problem.
Millions of production systems run PHP, and a rewrite is rarely the correct answer to a PHP problem. Most of the value we add is in hardening, structuring and integrating what is already there — which means the deliverable is a system you own and can keep running, not a migration you have to fund twice.
Typed properties, union types, enums, readonly classes, first-class callables, named arguments and fibre-based concurrency. We write and maintain PHP 8.2+ rather than carrying legacy idioms forward, which is usually the single highest-return change available on an old codebase.
N+1 queries, unbounded result sets, synchronous work inside request handlers and missing indexes. These account for most of the slowness in older PHP applications, and they are diagnosable with a profiler rather than guessable.
Pinning, auditing and reproducible builds. A meaningful part of securing an old PHP application is working out which of its hundreds of transitive dependencies are actually still needed — and the answer is often that most of them are not.
What we build
Not a capability list. These are the engagements we take on, described by what changes for the business when they are finished.
Incremental moves to a supported framework version, a real database layer, and a test suite — delivered in stages so the business keeps trading throughout.
Custom themes and plugins, headless WordPress front ends, WooCommerce extensions and the performance work that shared hosting punishes.
Profiling slow endpoints, eliminating redundant queries, patching dependencies and adding the input validation and escaping the original code was missing.
A documented, permissioned API in front of a database or application that was never designed to be integrated — often the cheapest route to a modern front end.
Limits and alternatives
We would rather lose the enquiry than take a project the technology cannot serve. These are the cases where we recommend something else — including other things we build.
PHP is a language; Laravel is a framework. For a new operational system we would normally reach for Laravel, and the PHP page is where the language-level and inherited-codebase work lives. If you are choosing a stack from scratch, read the Laravel page first.
PHP is a request-response language. Long-running numerical work, machine learning and continuous real-time fan-out belong in Python or Node.js, and we will say so rather than force a queue of PHP workers to do it.
Most PHP in the world sits on shared hosting with no shell access, no queue workers and no cron beyond the panel. We can work within that, but a system that needs background processing has to move — and pretending otherwise costs more than the migration.
Looking for something narrower? Laravel development company covers new Laravel builds belong on the Laravel page, which can be specific about the framework instead of covering both.
The surrounding stack
No technology runs alone. This is the rest of the stack that ships alongside it, so you can see the whole system rather than one component.
FAQ
The questions buyers actually ask before commissioning PHP work, answered without hedging.
For operational business software, yes — with a current framework version it is fast, extremely well understood, and hiring for it later is easy. The problems people remember with PHP are largely problems with a 2005 architecture, not with the language.
Usually maintain and improve it, in stages. A rewrite is almost never the cheapest path and it is where projects die. We will tell you honestly which parts have to be replaced and which can be made to last another few years.
Yes. Most WordPress slowness is plugin bloat, uncached database queries and oversized media rather than the platform. We profile before changing anything, and we will tell you if a plugin you pay for is the problem.
Yes. We maintain and extend CodeIgniter applications regularly and build new work in Symfony where the client's team already runs it. The stack should serve the system you have.
Tell us what you are building and what is going wrong today. We will tell you whether this is the right technology, what it will take, and whether it is worth building at all.
