Hire a PHP Developer in the UK

What “hire a PHP developer” means here

Most businesses that search for a PHP developer are not looking for a CV. They have a problem with a deadline: an application that keeps falling over, a developer who has left, a hosting provider switching off an old PHP version, or a new system the business has already promised to customers. You need someone senior who can read unfamiliar code, make it safe to change, and then change it.

That is the offer. You hire Oliver Burton directly, a freelance PHP and Laravel developer trading as HTML Studio, based near Ibstock in Leicestershire and working remotely with UK businesses. There is no account manager, no junior developer swapped in after the contract is signed, and no offshore hand-off. The person who scopes the work is the person who does it.

If you already know the work is Laravel-specific, see Laravel developer UK. If you are comparing working arrangements, freelance PHP developer covers contracts, retainers and how a freelancer fits around an in-house team.

Typical reasons people get in touch

• The developer has gone. The application still runs, but nobody knows how it deploys, where the cron jobs live, or which server holds the only copy of something important. Start with rescue and takeover, which applies just as much to plain PHP as to Laravel.
• The PHP version is out of support. The host is forcing an upgrade, or a security review flagged it. See PHP upgrade for how that is done without breaking production.
• An old application still earns money. A custom PHP system from years ago runs orders, quotes or stock. It needs a careful owner, not a rewrite. See legacy PHP support.
• Something new needs building. An internal tool to replace a spreadsheet, a customer portal, an API for a mobile app or a partner. New builds are usually Laravel; see freelance Laravel developer.
• Two systems need to talk. An ERP, a payment provider, a warehouse system or an SMS gateway. Integration is mostly about failure handling, retries and data ownership, not the client library. See API and integration work.
• You need an honest second opinion. Before a rewrite, an acquisition or a new hire, a written code audit tells you what you actually have.

How hiring works, step by step

1. A short conversation, in writing first

Send a few lines through the form below or by email: what the application does, what is wrong or missing, and any date that genuinely matters. A written brief gets a better answer than a cold call, because it can be checked against the code later. A call follows when it helps.

2. A look at the real application

The repository, the hosting and the deploy process tell me more than any specification. Read access to the code, or a screen-share if access has to wait, is normally enough to see the PHP version, the framework (if any), the dependencies, the tests (if any) and the riskiest areas. This is where an estimate stops being a guess.

3. A written proposal with clear edges

You get a short document that says what is in scope, what is not, what depends on someone else (a host, a previous developer, a third-party supplier), the engagement model and the first milestone. If the work cannot be estimated honestly yet, the proposal says so and suggests a time-boxed discovery instead.

4. Access, a working local copy and backups

Before anything changes: an inventory of credentials and who owns them, the application running on a local machine, and backups confirmed by restoring one. Skipping this step is the most common way inherited projects go wrong.

5. Delivery in small, reviewable steps

Work is delivered as small pull requests with notes, deployed through a process you can see and repeat. You get progress you can check rather than a big reveal at the end. If you have an in-house developer, they can review everything.

What you get when you hire me

• One senior developer. The same person from the first email to the last deploy.
• Code in your repository. Your accounts, your hosting, your intellectual property. Nothing is kept back.
• Written records. Proposals, decisions, release notes and a handover document as part of the work, not an extra.
• A deploy path you keep. Whether it is Laravel Forge, a CI pipeline or a carefully documented manual process, it is written down and repeatable.
• Tests where they matter most. Characterisation tests around money, stock and permissions before risky changes, so behaviour is pinned down before it moves.
• Straight answers. If something is not worth doing, or needs a bigger team than one person, you will be told.

Technologies, briefly

PHP from older 5.x and 7.x code to current 8.x releases; Laravel for new work and for most rescues; MySQL, MariaDB and PostgreSQL; Redis and queues; REST APIs; Stripe; WordPress and WooCommerce where they sit next to a custom application; and front-ends in Blade, Livewire, Vue, or an existing React or Angular application. Hosting ranges from shared cPanel servers to Laravel Forge and cloud servers. The full list sits on the profile page.

Examples of the kind of work

Published case studies are anonymised and describe real outcomes without invented numbers. They show the shape of work that a PHP hire usually turns into: integration with systems the business already relies on, and improving what exists rather than replacing it.

• A customer self-service portal on a live ERP for a UK B2B distributor, which processed over £30 million in orders in 2025.
• A modern web interface on a 30-year-old ERP, keeping decades of business rules intact instead of rewriting them.
• Revenue-critical quoting moved out of a shared Excel file into a web application that has run for years.
• Two-way SMS from a legacy ERP through a worker queue, so messaging never slows the core system.

Those projects used a mix of technologies, not only PHP. The common thread is the approach: understand the existing system, protect what works, and change it in steps the business can absorb.

Hiring a freelancer, an agency or an employee

An employee makes sense when there is a steady, long-term stream of PHP work and someone to manage it. An agency makes sense when you need several people at once, or design and marketing alongside development. A senior freelancer makes sense when you need experience quickly, for a defined job or a part-time ongoing role, without a recruitment process. Many clients use a freelancer to stabilise things and write the documentation that makes a later hire easier. That is covered in more detail on the freelance PHP developer page.

Working across the UK, based in Leicestershire

Almost all work is remote, which means location rarely matters. For businesses nearby, I am based near Ibstock, so Leicester, the rest of Leicestershire and the wider East Midlands are within easy reach for the occasional on-site day.

What it costs

There is no single price for “a PHP developer”, because a two-day upgrade, a three-month build and a monthly retainer are different purchases. The PHP developer rates page explains the engagement models, what pushes a price up or down, and what is included. The honest way to get a number for your work is to share the brief and, ideally, the repository.

Before you get in touch

It helps to have: a sentence on what the application does; where it is hosted and who controls the account; whether you have the source code and in which repository; what is broken, missing or worrying you; and any real deadline. If you do not know some of these, that is normal and is often the first thing to sort out. See how I work for more on the day-to-day.