What to Actually Look For When Hiring a PHP Developer
Here's something that always catches people off guard: PHP runs on somewhere north of 75% of all websites. It's one of the most widely used programming languages on the planet. So finding a good PHP developer should be easy, right?
In my experience — and I've been doing this for over 25 years — it's anything but.
The sheer ubiquity of PHP is actually part of the problem. Because the barrier to entry has historically been low, there are a lot of people who can write PHP, but far fewer who write it well. Add in the explosion of PHP frameworks, the maturity of modern tooling like Laravel 12, and the rising expectations of SaaS products, and the gap between a developer who dabbles in PHP and one who genuinely understands it becomes enormous.
If you're a founder trying to build or scale a product, navigating that gap is genuinely difficult. So let me share what I've learned — both from my own work and from the conversations I have regularly with clients who come to me after things have gone wrong elsewhere.
Freelancer vs Agency: Not What You Might Expect
The first question most people ask is whether they should hire a freelancer or go with an agency. The assumption is often that an agency means more resource, more reliability, more professionalism. And sometimes that's true.
But I've seen the other side of it more times than I'd like. Agencies — especially at the mid-market level — often win projects on the strength of their senior team, then quietly hand the actual work to junior developers once the contract is signed. The person you met in the sales call? They're not writing your code.
I've rebuilt projects from scratch that clients paid significant agency fees for. Proper, expensive engagements where the client assumed the cost meant quality. In several cases, the work had clearly been outsourced overseas to developers who were still learning the fundamentals. The code wasn't malicious — it just wasn't production-ready, and certainly wasn't maintainable.
That's not a knock on junior developers or on offshore teams. Everyone starts somewhere, and great developers exist everywhere in the world. The issue is transparency. The client thought they were buying senior expertise. They weren't.
A freelancer — a good one — gives you direct access to the person actually doing the work. You can have a real conversation, ask real questions, and build a genuine working relationship. There's nowhere to hide, which is exactly how it should be.
Why Long-Term Beats Project-Based Every Time
One of the best shifts I've made in how I work is moving away from fixed-price, one-off projects toward longer-term arrangements with clients. This isn't just better for me — I genuinely believe it's better for the clients too, and here's why.
A fixed-price project creates a particular kind of pressure. Once the scope is agreed, the developer's incentive is to complete the work as quickly as possible and move on. Speed and margin become the priority, not quality and fit. Edge cases get ignored. Technical debt accumulates. The code gets shipped, the invoice gets paid, and six months later the client is dealing with problems nobody planned for.
When I work with someone over time — whether that's a monthly retainer, ongoing development support, or a fractional arrangement — the dynamic completely changes. I'm not trying to get out of the door. I'm invested in how the product performs next quarter, not just next week. I'll raise the thing that might slow us down now because I know it'll cause real pain later. That's the kind of advice you only get from someone who'll still be there when later arrives.
Working as a Fractional CTO
A significant part of my work these days falls under what I'd describe as fractional CTO support. For a lot of early-stage and growing SaaS businesses, hiring a full-time CTO isn't realistic — the cost is prohibitive and, frankly, you often don't need someone in that seat five days a week.
What you do need is someone who can help you make the right technical decisions. Someone to translate your business goals into a sensible technical strategy. Someone to push back when you're about to build something you want but don't actually need.
That last part matters more than people realise. Founders have great ideas — that's how they got to where they are. But not every idea needs to be built immediately, and some shouldn't be built at all. A good fractional CTO helps you prioritise ruthlessly. We talk about what the business needs to do in the next three months, and we build that. The shiny feature that would be nice to have in a perfect world? That goes on a list and we revisit it when it makes sense.
This kind of working relationship is only possible when there's continuity. A developer parachuting in for a fixed-price sprint doesn't know your business well enough to have that conversation. I do, because we've been working together.
Cost Is Not a Proxy for Quality
I want to address this directly because I see founders fall into this trap regularly: paying more does not guarantee a better outcome.
I understand the logic. If something is expensive, it must be good. If a developer charges a premium rate, they must be premium. But the market for development services doesn't work that cleanly. High rates can reflect genuine expertise. They can also reflect a polished sales process, a nice-looking website, or simply the fact that an agency has high overheads and needs to charge accordingly.
I've had clients come to me having paid genuinely eye-watering sums for work that was structurally unsound. In one case, a Laravel application that had cost tens of thousands of pounds had no tests, no queue handling, race conditions buried in the checkout flow, and database queries running inside loops that would have brought the app to its knees under any real load. The agency was reputable. The rates were high. The work wasn't good.
Conversely, I've seen lean, well-structured codebases built by developers charging modest rates who simply cared deeply about their craft.
When you're evaluating someone to build or look after your product, ask to see code they've written. Ask them to walk you through a technical decision they made on a past project and why. Ask what they'd do differently. Those conversations reveal far more than a day rate.
What I'd Actually Recommend
If you're a founder looking for PHP or Laravel development support, here's my honest advice:
Look for someone who asks questions before they quote. If a developer can give you a price before they understand your business, that's a red flag. Good developers want to understand the problem before they talk about solutions.
Prioritise communication over credentials. You're going to be working closely with this person. If they're difficult to get a straight answer from before you've hired them, it won't get easier afterwards.
Be wary of fixed-price proposals for anything complex. Fixed price works for small, well-defined tasks. For anything with moving parts — a SaaS product, a custom integration, a migration — it creates the wrong incentives. A longer-term arrangement with clear goals and regular check-ins is almost always a better fit.
Think partnership, not transaction. The best client relationships I have are ones where we're genuinely working toward the same outcome. I know their business, they trust my technical judgement, and we make decisions together. That doesn't happen on a fixed-price project. It happens over time.
Finding a great PHP developer is hard, but it's not impossible. The key is knowing what you're actually looking for — and understanding that the traditional hiring model, with its emphasis on price and speed, often gets in the way of finding it.