PHP Development Services

PHP, specifically

This page is about the language and the codebases written in it. The broader service is taking an ageing system and making it safe to change again, whatever it is written in. For that, see legacy modernisation.

PHP runs a very large share of the working web, including a lot of software that quietly makes money every day. Most of it does not need replacing. It needs maintaining by someone who is not afraid of it.

PHP 8 migrations

We run a compatibility assessment across the codebase first. Rector and PHPStan do the mechanical part; a person does the judgement. You get back a list of what breaks, grouped by how hard it is to fix. Then we work through it in reviewable batches, keeping the application deployable throughout. No branch sits unmergeable for a month.

The usual finds are implicit type coercions that now throw, removed functions such as each(), and string-to-number comparisons that changed behaviour in PHP 8. There is almost always one abandoned package that needs a decision.

Framework-free and mixed codebases

Not every PHP application is a framework application, and plenty are two frameworks plus a directory of scripts from 2013. We work in those without insisting on rewriting them into something tidier. Composer autoloading, a test harness around the parts that earn money, and gradual extraction of the logic worth keeping.

Where a framework genuinely helps, Laravel is usually the destination — but arriving there is a migration, not a prerequisite.

Security and dependency audits

A fixed-price audit covering dependency CVEs, input handling, authentication and session management, file upload paths, SQL construction, and configuration exposure. You get a prioritised list with severity and effort against each item. We are happy for your own team to do the fixing.

New PHP

When we start fresh, we write PHP a mid-level developer can read on their first day. Explicit types everywhere, small classes, and no clever magic that has to be explained in a handover call. Tests cover the paths where being wrong is expensive.

Our app is on PHP 5.6 / 7.x. Is it worth saving?

Usually yes. Unsupported PHP is a security problem and a hosting-cost problem, but neither requires a rewrite — see migrating a legacy PHP app without a rewrite for how we sequence it.

Can you work with our existing hosting?

Yes, including shared hosting and older stacks. We will tell you if the hosting itself is the bottleneck, with numbers.

Do you do WordPress?

We maintain and extend custom PHP within WordPress, and we build custom plugins. We do not do theme-shop work or page-builder sites — that is a different trade and other people do it better and cheaper.

How do you price this?

Audits and migrations are fixed price against a defined scope. Ongoing work is monthly. You see the assessment before committing to the work it recommends.