As always with these things it really depends on what you're trying to do and what your skill level / background is. Personally I find PHP + Laravel is great f

As always with these things it really depends on what you're trying to do and what your skill level / background is. Personally I find PHP + Laravel is great for throwing together a simple website. The amount functionality Laravel provides out of the box is incredible and so long as you're not doing anything too crazy you'll find most of the heavy lifting has been taken of for you. If you need to use a modern frontend JS framework on your frontend then I'd probably go with React (or Vue) with a Node/Express API. I'm not a huge fan of using Node on the backend for professional projects be honest, but if you're a single developer I think there are benefits to using a single language on both your frontend and backend. I've tried using Vue with Laravel before, but I didn't like constant context switching between languages. I've not got much experience with Ruby on Rails but I've heard good things about it and I suspect that would great option if you have familiarity with Ruby. I'm not sure if Rust would be the most productive choice? If you're just getting into web development I'd go with Laravel personally. I wouldn't complicate things just yet with adding modern frontend frameworks like React into the mix.