PHP is enormously popular. It has been around for more than 25 years and is still in active development.
Fast
Pure performance has been a strong focus in the latest versions of PHP. This ensures fast loading times and good scalability. PHP is increasingly used for business-critical applications, which require a long lifespan and great stability.
Safe
By using PHP frameworks and industry-standard security mechanisms, we protect your data and that of your customers.
The frameworks provide abstraction for mitigation of database injection and cover most OWASP topics.
Cross platform
PHP is also cross-platform and works on just about every possible server technology. It can deal with various web servers, the most popular of which are Apache HTTP Server and Nginx. PHP also has drivers for various database systems, relational databases such as MySQL, Mariadb, Postgres or NoSQL storages such as mongoDb or Redis.
All these things make sure that after all these years in use, PHP is still growing in popularity. Some very large websites, such as FaceBook, DailyMotion, WikiPedia and Slack are written in PHP. Who knows, maybe your project will too?