PHP Development
Modern PHP 8 engineering — and a route out of the legacy PHP that still runs so many businesses.
PHP still runs a very large share of the web, and modern PHP is a genuinely good language: typed, fast, and well tooled. The reputation problem comes from the enormous body of PHP 5-era code still in production — no types, no dependency management, SQL assembled by string concatenation. Both are PHP, and they need very different treatment.
Who this is for
Companies running a business-critical PHP application written years ago. Teams on an unsupported PHP version facing security exposure. Businesses that want to modernise without rewriting a working system from scratch.
Problems we solve
- Unsupported versions. PHP 5 or early 7 in production, receiving no security patches.
- SQL injection. Queries built by concatenation, common in older codebases.
- No dependency management. Libraries copied into the repository and never updated.
- No autoloading or structure. Includes and global state making change unsafe.
- Business logic in templates. Rules embedded in view files where nothing can test them.
What we build
- Modern PHP 8.3+ with strict types, enums, readonly classes and match expressions
- Composer dependency management with automated vulnerability scanning
- Prepared statements and parameter binding everywhere queries are built
- Incremental migration of legacy code into a supported framework
- PHPUnit or Pest coverage introduced before behaviour is changed
- Static analysis with PHPStan and enforced coding standards in CI
How we work
Legacy PHP is characterised before it is changed — tests that capture what it currently does, including the quirks other systems depend on. Version upgrades and security fixes come first because they are the standing risk. Migration into a framework happens module by module, with old and new running side by side, so there is always a way back.
Technologies we use
PHP 8.3+, Composer, Laravel and Symfony components, PHPStan for static analysis, Pest and PHPUnit for testing, MySQL and PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker and GitHub Actions.
Business benefits
- Security exposure from unsupported versions closed
- Substantial performance gains simply from a modern PHP runtime
- A codebase current developers will work on
- Incremental modernisation, with the business running throughout
Common questions
Should we rewrite or modernise?
Modernise, in most cases. A rewrite loses undocumented behaviour that something quietly depends on, and typically takes far longer than estimated. We recommend a rewrite only when the architecture genuinely cannot support what you need next.
Is PHP still a reasonable choice?
Modern PHP is fast, strongly tooled, and has a very large talent pool. For most web applications it is a sound and pragmatic choice.
Can you upgrade PHP without breaking things?
With tests in place, yes. Static analysis finds most incompatibilities ahead of time, and characterisation tests catch the rest before release.
Running an old PHP system? Start with the version and the security exposure.