Hi all, my site is currently PHP. I'm sorry to sound naive but what direct benefits does PHP offer over HTML? I just wanted to know. Thanks!

html is just markup. No processing on any data.
While php is server side scripting language. You can process actual data and can produce new data. You can access databases, work with images, send mails and many other things.
Web server supporting php will ultimately generate html code and sends it to client and browser will just output it on screen.

HTML is a static language for browsers. You need to power it with back-end processing using PHP or other programming language. You can not get anywhere with HTML nowadays if you need to use data from database or anything else.

Originally Posted by ILoveKnowledge

Hi all, my site is currently PHP. I'm sorry to sound naive but what direct benefits does PHP offer over HTML? I just wanted to know. Thanks!

PHP is scripting language and you can build dynamic website in PHP that uses database and all stuff. where in html there will be static website only. Though you will use html with php as well

Originally Posted by ILoveKnowledge

Hi all, my site is currently PHP. I'm sorry to sound naive but what direct benefits does PHP offer over HTML? I just wanted to know. Thanks!

Nope, your website is in HTML.

The "backend" maybe written in PHP, but the pages ARE HTML.