2025 PHP Migration and Version Adoption Trends - Zend

## 2025’s Biggest PHP Migration Pain Points In our final migration and upgrade question, we asked participants about the most time-consuming components of their last PHP upgrade. Of identified pain points, 38.21% identified Testing as the most time-consuming component of their last upgrade. This was followed by Refactoring (35.57%), before dropping steeply to Infrastructure Provisioning (9.15%), Planning (8.74%), Other (4.47%), and Compliance Renewals (3.86%). Repeated write-in answers included dependency management, unmaintained or un-updated libraries, debugging, and addressing deprecations between PHP versions. ### Pain Points Vary By Organization Size Next, we looked at PHP migration pain points segmented by company size. We found that smaller companies with 100 employees or fewer were more likely to identify Testing as the top pain point compared to their counterparts with over 100 employees. Larger organizations were far more likely to identify Refactoring as their biggest migration pain point at 45.39% of participants. ### Key Takeaways The best way to ensure success when performing a PHP migration is to have a robust test suite. ... However, challenges like testing and refactoring remain significant obstacles during PHP migrations, and teams still must carefully plan and strategize before beginning their migration process. Failure to do so can result in interrupted user experiences, expensive downtime, extended migration timelines, and a costly draw on available resources.