Thousands of PHP freelancing jobs are posted daily over the internet and in Freelancer.com specifically. PHP projects represent the largest part of Freelancer.com business, the reason why it’s considered as the biggest marketplace for PHP freelancing jobs with over seven million jobs to date.
The largest PHP Freelancing network
We have analyzed public data available in the website and contacted Freelancer.com to prepare this report. Overall Freelancer.com have just passed seven million (7,001,295) projects today with 5,692 projects posted in the last 24 hours.
Freelancer.com connect over 14 million employers and freelancers globally from over 247 countries, regions and territories. Through their marketplace, employers can hire freelancers to do work in areas such as software development, writing, data entry and design right through to engineering, the sciences, sales and marketing, accounting and legal services.
67% of Freelancer.com projects use PHP
More than 2 million projects related to PHP only since 2001, which represent almost 67% of all their projects. The second large programming language is the JavaScript followed by .NET and C/C#/C++. The number of projects using Perl, Python, and Ruby on rails is relatively small compared to all other programming languages used in Freelancer.com.
The value of PHP Freelancing projects
If we talk about the value of Freelance projects, PHP is also the top valuable skills in the network with a value of over $99 million dollars since 2001. However when we talk about value and dollars, you will notice a big difference compared to projects numbers. Because PHP projects are followed by JavaScript and .NET with over $54 million dollars each.
(We were not able to calculate the mean value of a project per year because the information is not available, and doing this calculation globally for 14 years doesn’t have a meaning. )
30% growth of PHP projects growth in 2014 compared to 2013
Nik Badminton, Regional Director, North America for Freelancer.com explained to PHPMagazine.net :
[pull_quote_center]PHP is a skill that still ranks as one of the top project request on freelancer.com. PHP projects went up from around 220K in 2013 to 280K in 2014. That is healthy growth and we see even more opportunities for developers that are skilled at PHP. We also hope for more growth through 2015 with PHP-related projects as well.[/pull_quote_center]
Top valuable skills related to PHP freelancing projects
We tried to analyze current PHP projects and extract related skills and “most valuable” ones based on approximate project value, and we find out the chart below which represent the top 10 valuable skills. The data analyzed is extracted from Freelancer.com and include only current projects : 2776 projects on January 19th, 2015, valued at around $2 millions dollars.
You will noticed that there are C/C#/C++ and even .NET available in some PHP projects, which mean in most of the cases that the choice of the programming language is not an issue. While in some other cases more than one programming language is required in a project coupled with PHP.
You notice also that HTML, website design, and graphic design are on the top chart after PHP. Seems like most of these skills are added by default, every time someone want to build a website he/she add the website design and graphic design skills, while mentioning in the description only website functionalities without any design details.
For content management systems we found mainly WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal, in addition to Magento which is more specific to e-Commerce projects. Most notable is that WordPress projects are the highest in number and in value compared to Joomla and Drupal.
Nik Badminton, Regional Director, North America for Freelancer.com added :
[pull_quote_center]After PHP we find good growth of projects posted for a number of other programming languages, including HTML, HTML5, jQuery, Javascript, AJAX, C, .NET and C#. This is not an exhaustive list and whatever your need is, or the language you program in, we invite you to come and join the platform.[/pull_quote_center]
