PHP will reduce time to create and maintain medium to large websites – due to the pages being dynamic, only a small number of PHP pages will need to be created/edited which will allow the use of a Database (commonly MySQL), containing the websites’ content. The contents of the database are extracted by PHP and a page is created ‘on-the-fly’.

A few more of PHP’s benefits are shown below:

• Allow the website to customize each users experience, based on information gathered from them.
• Create websites that allow users to purchase items off a website (known as ecommerce).
• PHP users can download and use many free Open Source PHP tools on their website.
• As PHP is executed on the server this means that the PHP is not dependant on the users’ computer settings. For example, a user requesting a page in Firefox will get the same PHP Output as that of a user viewing in Internet Explorer, but please bear in mind that the way the HTML/CSS output is formatted may differ between the two. You will most likely have met this if you have used HTML/CSS to an intermediate level.
• All PHP’s commands are described and examples given in the PHP Online Manual.