Engineering Stacks

PHP Development

Modern PHP, and honest help with the older kind. A large share of the working web runs on PHP, and much of it is one version upgrade away from being genuinely good again.

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Legacy rescue, not legacy shaming

We get called about PHP applications that have been running the business for a decade and are now stuck on an unsupported version. The instinct to rewrite is usually wrong — it is expensive, it takes a year, and the new system has to relearn every edge case the old one already handles.

We prefer a staged path: get it onto a supported version, add tests around the parts that must not break, introduce a dependency manager and a build, then refactor incrementally with the safety net in place.

New builds on current PHP

PHP 8 is a genuinely good language — typed properties, enums, fibers, real performance. New work gets strict types, static analysis, dependency injection and a test suite from the first commit.

What the engagement includes

  • Version upgrade

    A staged path to a supported, secure PHP version.

  • Test harness

    Coverage around the behaviour you cannot afford to lose.

  • Static analysis

    PHPStan or Psalm in CI, raised a level at a time.

  • Security review

    Injection, session handling, upload and dependency audit.

  • Performance

    Query review, caching, OPcache and profiling.

  • New development

    Modern PHP with proper tooling from day one.

Technologies we use

  • PHP 8
  • Laravel
  • Symfony
  • Composer
  • PHPUnit
  • PHPStan
  • MySQL
  • MariaDB
  • Redis
  • WordPress

Frequently asked questions

Our site runs on an old PHP version. Is that urgent?

If it is past end-of-life, yes — unsupported versions stop receiving security patches, and hosts increasingly refuse to run them. It is usually a smaller job than people fear, and we can scope it from a read-only look at the codebase.

Should we rewrite our PHP application in something else?

Rarely, and almost never for the reason people give. If the application works and the business understands it, modernising in place is cheaper and lower risk. We will tell you when a rewrite genuinely is the right call.

Do you work with Laravel?

Yes — see our Laravel page. For new PHP applications of any size it is usually our default, because the conventions mean a new developer is productive in days.

Can you help with WordPress and PHP together?

Yes. A lot of our PHP work is custom plugin and theme development where a client needs behaviour WordPress does not provide out of the box.

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