Compared to what, exactly? Ruby? I'll give you Node for double performance and roughly equivalent (and annoying) maintenance, but PHP's security story, with or without the various popular frameworks, is at least as good. Any stack built on the JVM has its own set of tradeoffs -- I would rather maintain PHP than any standard JavaEE solution, but I would rather maintain anything built on Clojure's Ring than PHP. These days Python with Flask is my go-to solution for quick things where I might have used PHP in the past, but even then there are tradeoffs, near the top being you can't just deploy to any shared hosting service that's been around for over a decade.
Other alternatives included about any safe, systems or apps language of the time. Ada, Pascal, industrial BASIC, Smalltalk, Common LISP, Ocaml, Eiffel, and so on. Even subsets of C++ and Java using simpler frameworks were better for some although I didn't try that haha. REBOL might have had something then, too. Didn't get around go trying it, though.