PHP Development Services

PHP development services covers four different jobs, and a good vendor will tell you which one you are buying:

• New builds. A web application, customer portal, SaaS product, or internal system designed and built from a spec, usually on Laravel or Symfony, with a React, Vue, or Angular frontend when the UI is complex.
• APIs. REST or GraphQL backends in PHP that serve mobile apps and decoupled frontends, with versioning, authentication, and rate limiting from the first release.
• Platform work. Custom modules, integrations, and performance work on WordPress, Drupal, Magento, or another PHP platform that already runs your business.
• Modernization. Moving a working but ageing PHP codebase (PHP 5 or 7, CodeIgniter, Zend, Yii 1, or no framework at all) to PHP 8 and a supported framework, in phases, without stopping the business.

Plus8Soft does all four. About half of the PHP projects we start are the fourth kind.

When PHP is the right choice, and when it is not

Choose PHP when the product is web-first and content- or transaction-heavy: portals, marketplaces, e-commerce, back-office systems, and anything that has to live alongside WordPress, Drupal, or Magento. The ecosystem is large, hosting is cheap, and PHP 8 with typed properties, enums, fibers, and the JIT compiler closed most of the performance gap that older versions had.

Choose something else when the core of the product is long-lived connections or heavy concurrency (real-time trading, streaming, IoT ingestion). We build those on Go or Node.js, and we will say so on the first call rather than force PHP into it.

What PHP development costs

Two reference points. A senior PHP developer employed in the United States earns $105,500 to $138,000 a year in base salary, average $124,327 (ZipRecruiter, April 2026); the all-levels average is $102,005 (August 2026).

Timelines depend on scope, but two anchors help planning: a Laravel MVP with authentication, a data model, an admin panel, and one or two integrations usually takes 8 to 12 weeks; a phased PHP 7 to PHP 8 migration of a mid-size application runs 3 to 6 months alongside normal releases. Use the project cost estimator for a first number.

Modernizing PHP you already have

Legacy PHP is where most PHP budgets actually go, and it is the work most vendors are vague about. Our sequence: a code and dependency audit with a risk list (unsupported PHP version, abandoned packages, SQL built by string concatenation, missing tests); a stabilization pass so the current system stops causing incidents; then a phased migration, one bounded context at a time, behind the same URLs, so users never see a cut-over day.