Plenty of licensed and some cost-free script-driven apps have encrypted code, that isn't human readable. The reasoning behind this is to stop the reverse engineering as well as the unwanted use of such applications. Among the most popular encryption software instruments used for this purpose is named Zend Guard and it is commonly used since it can be used to alter any PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7 and PHP 8 code. The only method for the protected files to work efficiently on a web server afterwards is when an additional tool called Zend Optimizer is present. If you'd like to work with any paid web software which requires Zend Optimizer, you have to make sure that it's set up on the server where you'll host your site. In addition, sites which need the tool usually perform better because their code is already precompiled and optimized, and therefore it's executed more quickly.