For a long time, PHP was the language it was safe to make fun of. It powered an enormous share of the web, and continues to do so, but admitting you wrote it felt a little like admitting you still chose to use Microsoft’s terrible browser, Internet Explorer, on purpose!
The jokes had a kernel of truth, too: early PHP had inconsistent function names, surprising type coercions, and a default posture that let beginners easily ship insecure code. Back then, serious web work was often done in Ruby on Rails instead; and as PHP became the punchline through the 2000s, the developers who looked down on it either stuck with Ruby or gravitated to Python and Node.js.
However, somewhere in the last decade, PHP, and especially the world that grew up around Laravel, changed enough that it is now taken seriously again. Here’s what actually happened, and why server-side development in PHP is, against the odds, genuinely interesting again.
First, the language grew up
The turning point most people forget is the language itself. Excuse the jargon, but PHP 7, back in 2015, roughly doubled performance overnight and introduced proper scalar type declarations and return types (e.g. Boolean, integer, float, string).
PHP 8, in 2020, added a JIT (“just in time”) compiler, named arguments, union types, attributes, enums, readonly properties, constructor promotion, and the match expression. The 8.x line that followed kept going in the same direction.
Over time, PHP developed into a language with a real type system, modern syntax, and good performance. Reputation lags reality by years, so plenty of developers still picture PHP as it was around 2009. The PHP you’d actually write today looks and behaves like a completely different language.
Our agency has worked with PHP for literal decades and we have seen the changes first hand: they have been nothing short of dramatic!
Then, Laravel made it pleasant
A fast language with a decent type system is necessary but not sufficient; people also have to enjoy using it. That’s Laravel’s major contribution.
When Taylor Otwell released it in 2011, it brought the kind of developer ergonomics that Ruby on Rails had taught people to expect: an expressive ORM or “Object–relational mapping” that converts data between a relational database and the memory of an object-oriented programming languages (i.e. Eloquent), clean routing, a readable templating layer (called “Blade”), database migrations, a first-class command-line tool (Artisan), and enough sensible conventions that you weren’t relitigating project structure on every new build.
It made writing PHP feel less like assembling plumbing and more like building the thing you actually wanted to build. Over the 2010s it became the default choice for serious PHP application work, and its community became one of the most active in web development.
A whole ecosystem
Over time, Laravel has also developed beyond being “just” a framework: it is now a whole suite of products built to remove the unglamorous 80% of making and running a web application. The boring-but-essential stuff is available out-of-the-box: authentication, queues and background jobs, mail, validation, caching, full-text search (Scout), billing (Cashier), API tokens (Sanctum), real-time broadcasting (Reverb and Echo).
The operational side is covered too. Among our own projects, we rely on Horizon for executing synchronous tasks, and we use Nightwatch to keep an eye on our projects. Regarding the backend, we build most of our admin interfaces using Laravel Nova, which is perfect for the data-management layer. Nova alone saves weeks of building the CRUD (create, read, update, delete) screens nobody enjoys building.
Around the first-party tooling sits a community ecosystem that’s just as strong: Livewire and Inertia for rich, interactive front-ends, Filament for standing up admin panels and internal tools at speed, Pest for testing. The practical upshot is that a small team can ship a real, production-grade application without first bolting together forty loosely related packages and a brittle build pipeline. The framework has already made all the boring decisions.
Studying how Laravel does things has also forced us to up our own PHP game. Time and again, we learn that the “Laravel way” is often the best way when it comes to handling code in PHP. It also helps that the documentation is a relatively light and fun read, so that learning never becomes a chore.
Server-side got interesting again
For most of the last decade, the fashionable answer to “How should we build this?” was a single-page JavaScript application talking to a separate API, often with a headless CMS behind it. For genuinely app-like products, that’s still frequently the right call.
But for the large category of business applications most agencies build, it often meant taking on a great deal of complexity – two codebases, a build step, state synchronised across a network boundary – to solve problems many of those projects simply didn’t have. It also offloads a lot of the work to the client – the browser – rather than the server. This can cause more severe security and optimization issues than when things are handled server-side.
Thanks in large part to projects like Laravel, the pendulum has swung back toward server-first pragmatism. Tools like Livewire and Inertia let you build genuinely interactive interfaces while keeping your logic on the server, where it’s easier to reason about and to secure.
The ecosystem hasn’t sat out the AI wave, either. Laravel 13, released in March 2026, shipped a stable first-party AI SDK – a provider-agnostic interface for text generation, tool-calling agents, and the rest – to the point where the project’s own tagline now talks about building for “Artisans and agents”, so human developers as well as AI. Whatever you make of the surrounding hype, this is plainly not a framework content with remaining stagnant.
Why this matters to us
We reach for Laravel when a project outgrows themes and plugins, when there is real application logic, complex data, integrations to manage, an admin layer that has to be genuinely good to use rather than merely present. It lets a small team take on work that would otherwise demand a much larger one, and it makes that work pleasant enough that good developers actually want to do it.
Laravel offers a stack that’s fast, modern, well-tooled, and enjoyable to write. PHP spent years as the language you ended up with by default. Laravel turned it into one you might actively pick over all others. And from where we sit, writing it day to day, that shift is the whole story.
If you think Laravel might be a good fit for your company or project, feel free to reach out.
