In today’s fast-paced digital world, website speed is no longer a luxury; it’s a necessity. Every millisecond counts, and slow loading times can lead to frustrated visitors, lost conversions, and ultimately, a negative impact on your bottom line.
That’s where PHP 8.3 comes in. As the latest version of the popular scripting language, PHP 8.3 delivers a significant performance boost over its predecessors. But how much of a difference can you actually expect? Let’s dive into some benchmarks to see for ourselves.
GTMetrix
As you can see, PHP 8.3 offers significant performance improvements over both PHP 8.0 and 8.2. The page load time, TTFB, and LCP were all reduced by over 20%.
In addition to the overall performance improvements, there are a few other specific areas where PHP 8.3 outshines PHP 8.0 and 8.2. For example, PHP 8.3 is able to load images and CSS files more quickly, which can have a significant impact on the overall page load time. Additionally, PHP 8.3 is able to handle more concurrent requests, which can improve the performance of high-traffic websites. Overall, the GTmetrix results clearly show that PHP 8.3 is the fastest version of PHP to date.
Pagespeed
As you can see, PHP 8.3 offers performance improvements over both PHP 8.0 and 8.2. While PHP 8.0 and 8.2 remains about the same. The First Contentful Paint remains at 0.8s for both versions while reducing to 0.7 for PHP 8.3 but it is with the Largest Contentful Paint that we see the bigest changes since the time it takes keeps reducing the higher the PHP version, ending at an incredible good 1.7s for PHP 8.3.
Webpagetest
Now we are going to compare the 3 PHP interpreter versions in webpagetest
Here are some things we can gather from the results
- Start Render: PHP 8.3 is 146 milliseconds faster than PHP 8.2. This means that the page starts rendering content for users sooner.
- First Contentful Paint (FCP): PHP 8.3 is 115 milliseconds faster than PHP 8.2. This means that the page becomes visually interactive sooner.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): PHP 8.3 is 86 milliseconds faster than PHP 8.2. This means that the page becomes fully loaded and visually complete sooner.
- Total Blocking Time (TBT): PHP 8.3 is 11 milliseconds faster than PHP 8.2. This means that the browser is blocked from processing user input for less time due to JavaScript and CSS loading.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): PHP 8.3 has a CLS score of 0.05, while PHP 8.2 has a CLS score of 0.10. This means that the layout of the page shifts less during loading, which provides a better user experience.
The performance improvements from PHP 8.0 to PHP 8.3 are even more significant
- Start Render: PHP 8.3 is 200 milliseconds faster than PHP 8.0.
- FCP: PHP 8.3 is 189 milliseconds faster than PHP 8.0.
- LCP: PHP 8.3 is 130 milliseconds faster than PHP 8.0.
- TBT: PHP 8.3 is 19 milliseconds faster than PHP 8.0.
- CLS: PHP 8.3 has a CLS score of 0.05, while PHP 8.0 has a CLS score of 0.13.
So, why is PHP 8.3 faster than PHP 8.0 and 8.2?
There are a number of reasons why PHP 8.3 is faster than PHP 8.0 and 8.2. Some of the most significant factors include:
- JIT compiler: PHP 8.3 introduces a JIT compiler, which can significantly improve performance for certain types of code.
- Improved memory management: PHP 8.3 includes a number of improvements to memory management, which can help to reduce memory usage and improve performance.
- New features and syntax: PHP 8.3 adds a number of new features and syntax improvements, such as nullsafe operators, union types, and static return types, which can make your code more concise and efficient.
- Enhanced security: PHP 8.3 strengthens security with new features like read-only properties, constructor promotion, and named arguments.
Conclusion: PHP 8.3 Reigns Supreme in Performance
Across the various performance testing tools employed (GTmetrix, PageSpeed Insights, and WebPageTest), one clear victor emerges: PHP 8.3 consistently outperforms both PHP 8.0 and 8.2. This is evident across key metrics like First Contentful Paint (FCP), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Speed Index, Total Blocking Time (TBT), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
Upgrading to PHP 8.3 is a free performance upgrade but may trigger plugin incompatibilities. Feel free to contact us if you want to promote your sites to PHP 8.3. We will be happy to assist you.