PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor is a server-side scripting language. Since its conception in 1994, it quickly rose to popularity among the developers for website development mainly for eCommerce websites. If you are starting your own eCommerce website and are in a dilemma to choose a server-side scripting language, then this post is for you. In this post let us see why PHP is a better option for your eCommerce websites.
Table of Contents
PHP is Open Source and Budget-friendly
With PHP you don’t need to pay any kind of royalty fees as it is freely available. It means that PHP doesn’t require licensing and downloading fees. This is because PHP is open-source and is made public under the General Public License. This ensures low developmental and maintenance costs, making it a budget friendly option for your ecommerce website.
Good Community Support
Since PHP is an open source project, there are many developers who are constantly working on it. This pooling in of many PHP developers and coders enable large scale brainstorming of ideas by organised discussions. They get to share their experiences in terms of logics, coding, plugin, etc. This all makes the community stay up to date with the developments and strive for easy eCommerce website development.
Less time-consuming development and availability of various frameworks
PHP partially being an object oriented language enables code reusability. Because of the availability of a large community support, it prevents the reinventing of the wheel and uses the already tested solution available. This saves much effort and time during the developmental and maintenance processes.
There are many PHP frameworks such as Zend, CakePHP, Laravel, CodeIgnite, WordPress,etc. Each has a wide range of functionality features and modules. They also come with their own pros and cons. They too offer to recycle the code, thereby further increasing the rate of developmental processes.
With the availability of various frameworks, you need to be careful in choosing the framework that suits your needs. So it is important to discuss this with your developers as they would have a greater knowledge about the needs of your website. Check out for best eCommerce PHP script.
Also Read:
Integrative, Flexible and easily scalable
PHP is compatible with all the available platforms from Linux, Windows, MacOS and Unix. It can support most of the servers and databases. So it’s a great choice for creating cross-platform applications. You can use PHP with not only HTML but integrate it with other programming languages such as JavaScript, WML, XML, etc. PHP also offers the right tools for the developers that enable them to create a scalable architecture. With iteration, you can develop and launch different modules progressively and make the required changes during the development.
PHP is faster
If your web pages load slowly, it generally results in customers abandoning your website because of low user experience. Not only that your website consumes a lot of server resources in loading the pages and might increase your hosting charges. So fast loading web pages are a great necessity for customer retention on your website.
PHP has the primary attribute of speed. It was created with the intent for the usage in dynamic web pages. It’s code can be easily integrated with HTML and developers can turn existing static web pages into dynamic by this integration. PHP compared with other programming languages shows less memory consumption and increase in catalog requests due to reduced load times.
PHP being a very light on servers shows up as a great option for your choice of server side language. Being light enables fast data processing features, remarkable customizability and easy integrating with various plugins and CMS.
Better offers for hosting
Due to its flexibility and vestile nature, PHP poses a great option for many hosting providers. In general, many of the hosting packages come with PHP support at little to no expenses web host plans. It can also have shared plans that come with domain names free of cost and unlimited resource allocation.
Easy to use and Easily Customisable
PHP can be easily integrated with HTML and CSS without the use of any special plugins or any other software. It enables one on one correspondence with the files and the URLs by default. This eases the developmental process and collaboration among the programmers, designers, etc in building the web pages. This comes off as a great advantage in the development of large static websites that come with many content pages.
With the availability of many PHP frameworks, you can easily customize your eCommerce website that is more engaging and provides greater user experience to your customers. You can also increase the functionality of your website by integrating readily available plugins and templates. You can easily equip your website with multiple currency acceptance, online payment gateway, product inventory, sales analysis tools, etc with the plugins.
Greater security
Your eCommerce website is a hub to many financial transactions which makes it important for the customers to trust your website in disclosing their transactional information. For this you need to keep the transactional information confidential. This can easily be achieved by PHP frameworks which come with built-in security features which can secure the transaction details of your customer. As a general solution, it is better to outsource your payments to a dedicated service provider to avoid endangering your customers’ sensitive data. All in all you need to understand that it is the code that makes your website vulnerable but the language in which it is coded.
More than 75% of the eCommerce website and WordPress website use PHP as server side language. So this opened many cyberattacks over these websites. PHP being open source enabled the white-hat hackers to run tests and spot major PHP security problems. This knowledge helps you to prevent your website from a devastating cyberattack.
Makes easy for eCommerce performance analysis
With PHP, your website can be easily connected with a sales analytics service such as Google Analytics. Or you can integrate one if you are using a dedicated CRM. But the PHP framework you might be using itself might have options for the sales analytics tool. Your sales analysis is a very important task to stay ahead of your competitors. They let you see which of your products or services are being sold more and thereby helps you to understand your consumers’ preferences. You can accordingly opt for a strategy that is more profitable and one which enables you to grow your business.
Even though PHP is one of the older languages, its growth and popularity in recent years still continue. It comes with all the needed goodies which are inexpensiveness, simplicity, flexibility, easy integrability, and user-friendliness. PHP is versatile as it can be used in a variety of projects, be it simple website development to large eCommerce websites. The development of many of its frameworks can greatly increase your website’s functionality from product inventory to easy checkouts. PHP remains the best option to choose that meets your eCommerce needs.
Alex is fascinated with “understanding” people. It’s actually what drives everything he does. He believes in a thoughtful exploration of how you shape your thoughts, experience of the world.