Quick test. Pull up your business website on your phone, tap around a little, and look at the address bar. See something like contact.php or index.php?page=services?
Congratulations. Your website runs on PHP, and there's a good chance it was built back when people were still burning CDs.
That's not a knock on you. It's how a lot of Redding business websites got made. Somebody's nephew or a local designer built it in 2006 or 2011, it worked, and nobody has touched it since. Meanwhile the internet moved on, your customers moved to their phones, and Google got a lot pickier about what it shows them.
What PHP Is, and Why So Many Redding Sites Run on It
PHP is a programming language that runs on the web server. Every time someone opens one of your pages, the server runs the PHP code, pulls your content out of a database, builds the page from scratch and sends it over. In the 2000s that was the standard way to build a business website, so a huge number of the sites around town were built exactly this way.
To be fair to PHP, the language itself has kept improving, and modern PHP can be perfectly quick. The problem isn't the three letters. It's the 2000s-era PHP site sitting on cheap shared hosting that hasn't been updated in a decade.
Signs Your Website Is Stuck in the 2000s
You don't need to read code to spot it. If a few of these sound familiar, your site is overdue:
- The copyright in the footer is older than your newest employee. "© 2012" tells every visitor nobody's home.
- You have to pinch and zoom on a phone. The site was built for desktop monitors, and phones get a shrunken copy.
- The phone number isn't tappable. On a phone, the one thing a customer wants to do is call you. If they have to copy and paste your number, some of them won't bother.
- Pages take a few seconds to show up. Every click waits for the server to rebuild the page.
- Your browser says the site is "Not secure." No HTTPS is an instant trust killer.
- The contact form sends to an email nobody checks, or it quietly stopped working years ago.
- You can't remember who built it, or how to log in.
What an Old PHP Site Is Costing You
Speed. On an old PHP setup, every page is put together on the server every time someone asks for it, usually on a shared server split with hundreds of other sites. Google's own research found that most mobile visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. Those were people who were ready to call you.
Rankings. Google looks at the mobile version of your site first, and it measures real loading speed and layout stability through Core Web Vitals. A slow, desktop-only site starts every search at a disadvantage, no matter how good your work is.
Security. Old versions of PHP, like PHP 5 and PHP 7, no longer get security updates. Neither do the old scripts and plugins that usually come along with them. An abandoned site is an easy target, and a hacked site can end up with a warning in front of it in Google.
Trust. Customers judge you in seconds. An outdated site makes a great business look like it closed in 2014.
What I Build Instead
I build on a modern stack: code written from scratch in Next.js, pages built ahead of time and served from a global network, so they load fast wherever your customer is. No page builders, no pile of plugins, and no server rebuilding every page on every click.
What that gets you:
- Pages that load fast on a phone, even on spotty Shasta County signal.
- A design built for phones first, with a tap-to-call button right where a thumb lands.
- Search structure baked in from the first line of code: titles, headings, schema markup and a sitemap Google can read.
- HTTPS, and nothing old lying around for someone to break into.
This website runs on the same stack. Click around. That's the speed I'm talking about.
"But My Site Still Works"
So does a flip phone. The question isn't whether your site turns on. It's whether it brings you calls, or quietly sends them to the competitor whose site loads first.
Here's the honest version. If your business runs on word of mouth and you don't care about Google, an old site won't sink you. But if you want people searching in Redding to find you and call, your website is your storefront, and right now it might have a "closed" sign in the window without you knowing it.
Not Sure What You're Running?
Send me your web address. I'll tell you what it's built on, how it loads on a phone, and what I'd fix first, straight, no pitch. If it's fine, I'll tell you that too.
Start a project, or see what a website audit covers. And if your site is PHP from 2009: yeah, you're probably a fit for a new website.