I haven&#x27;t made that journey, and it depends on how complicated the sites you want to &quot;setup&quot; are, but here&#x27;s my advice as someone doing full stack web development for several years, having started from frameworkless PHP and now preferring the Single Page App (SPA) stack of Flask + SQLAlchemy + flask-restless (REST API framework) + Backbone models + React:<p>SPAs are only really necessary for certain use-cases, and while having a strict client-server separation does have benefits, it also incurs upfront costs.<p>You can still get by perfectly well generating HTML server-side with PHP or Perl and MySQL.  You may want to check out MariaDB, a fork of MySQL by the original creator if you haven&#x27;t heard of it.  Postgres also finally just added upsert (INSERT ON DUPLICATE ...), which might be the last real barrier to migrating from MySQL, so if you don&#x27;t have a ton of lingering MySQL-specific knowledge, you might want to start with Postgres, as it seems to be the default in a lot of FOSS situations these days.<p>There&#x27;s certainly been lots of innovation in server-side web frameworks and ORMs in PHP and Perl since the 90s.  I can&#x27;t speak to Perl but Slim is a good PHP microframework and Propel is a nice ORM, though there are also more heavy-duty frameworks such as Laravel.<p>If you don&#x27;t mind learning a new language, I would recommend Python for any backend web development that doesn&#x27;t require squeezing out as low response times as possible, which gives you the excellent Flask + SQLAlchemy, or Django if you prefer a little more hand-holding.<p>You can still use JavaScript to add interactivity without making a SPA.  jQuery, Backbone, and React would do that in increasing levels of abstraction.<p>In the grand scheme of things, the changes to HTML&#x2F;CSS since the 90s have been relatively small.  If you use Bootstrap you might not even have to worry about them too much.<p>In summary,<p>- MySQL or Postgres<p>- Generate HTML server-side starting with a PHP or Python microframework and ORM, upgrade to a batteries-included framework if you discover you need it<p>- Use Bootstrap<p>- add interactivity with jQuery or (if you want to learn it) React (React-Bootstrap is nice); switch to full SPA if you discover you need it (in that case you&#x27;ll probably want react-router, SystemJS, and JSPM)<p>- use Heroku or equivalent to avoid system administration<p>- with the combination of cross-browser libraries (jQuery, React) and the latest versions of all the popular browsers having fewer and fewer inconsistencies, you actually don&#x27;t need to worry too much about how to support multiple browsers unless you want to support really old browsers that only make up a few percent usage share combined.