What is more performant than PHP for Web Development?

Simple honest answer is any compiled language will likely beat it. Your big ones being C, C++, Go and Rust. I personally despise Go but it does categorically run faster than PHP so is a valid answer here. However there’s a ton of other compiled languages based on GCC and LLVM and many of them will likely have a web framework or two.

I’d personally recommend Rust if only for for better integration with the Erlang/Elixir ecosystem which is the other super powerful language that can be a real secret weapon in terms of scaling performance once you need more than a single hardware mode.

Go is generally faster, but if you have performance issues, the language may not be the first thing to look at.

Look at your caching strategies, dependencies (APIs, databases), what could be static, etc. The frontend part is as important as the backend.

For something written from scratch today, I would actually highly recommend a stack such as Remix. Everything feels super fast, not because of a language, but because of the framework design.

Golang? C++?