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I can tell you one problem right away. This part won't work with pipe streams like php files:

//get the length of file in bytes
    fseek(file, 0, SEEK_END);
    byte_length = ftell(file);
    fseek(file, 0, SEEK_SET);

To get the load() function working correctly 100% of the time, one usually needs to read from the stream progressively and use realloc() when needed.

DinoCoderSaurus gave some advice about it here: pset6 (webserver) - hello.php not loading properly

EDIT to tackle index.php problem:

Look what's happening here:

result = (access(linkphp, F_OK) != -1) ? linkphp : NULL;
if (result != linkphp)
    free(linkphp);

result = (access(linkhtml, F_OK) != -1) ? linkhtml : NULL;
if (result != linkhtml)
    free(linkhtml);

return result;

Now suppose there is a file called index.php inside the directory. That first part of the code will make the variable result point to linkphp, but you don't return it, so the computer proceeds to analyze the rest of the code.

What comes next? Well, it checks for the existence of index.html... and let's suppose it doesn't exist. result will now point to NULL.

At the end of the function, NULL will be returned, even though the correct answer would be to return linkphp. See the problem there?