Laravel vs Wordpress: When to Choose?

When startup founders or business owners describe their ideas about their expected websites, good development companies should be able to choose the best technology for creating the required final product. These technologies may refer to any kind of CMS like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc… or based on any framework like Laravel, Symphony, etc…

As you may know, nowadays the most popular CMS is WordPress and the framework is Laravel. That is why we are going to discuss their main differences and identify when it’s better to choose one over the other. So, the competition laravel vs WordPress is always actual.

WordPress

As some of you may already know, the advantages of WordPress make it the most popular CMS software in the world, there are about 16.000.000 websites based on it. Companies like New York Post, TED, USA Today, Time.com, Spotify, TechCrunch, and many more, all use WordPress. But why do development companies choose this content management system? Most developers love WordPress because:

• It’s pretty fast to start development
• It’s SEO friendly
• There are a lot of ready plugins and themes that are used to speed up the development process.

Accordingly, if you want to build a website that is based on content, such as a blog, newsletter, or simple company website, you can definitely go with WordPress.

However, WordPress is not always ideal. Sometimes you may face a lot of problems that come with WordPress. You will need to use different types of plugins on any website and in case one of them has security issues, your site will be under vulnerability too.

On the other hand, updating WordPress plugins can cause a lot of headaches. Even a single simple plugin update can crash your overall website if it’s not written according to the standards. So, make sure you are enough careful about choosing the best WordPress plugins as well as managing them. 

Another failure of WordPress is that it’s also not possible to build highly scalable applications. Well, of course, it’s possible but eventually, it will be very difficult to manage development, and someday it may even not be possible to handle issues.

You see? WordPress is more like a drag and drop solution for websites. These kinds of platforms make your actions and their results instantly visible, while there is a lack of high functionality. Here is when the WordPress vs Laravel competition comes up again.

Laravel

Laravel was build in 2011 by Taylor Otwell. Currently, it’s the most popular PHP framework. This framework strongly pushes developers to use OOP (Object Oriented programming) and some other modern programming principles like SOLID. 

Laravel has a very nice structure and lots of features that focus on speeding up the development. Below you may find some of them: 

• Authentications
• API Authentication
• Encryption
• Query Builder
• Migrations
• Eloquent ORM and much more.

Laravel vs WordPress

When you need to develop software solutions such as marketplaces, SAAS platforms, custom e-commerce solutions, or any platform where users are required to register in order to navigate and implement further activities, it’s better to go with Laravel.

Development Costs 

While dealing with the development of software solutions, one of the most important factors to consider is the budget. Simple WordPress websites can cost from $1000 - $5000, while Laravel applications can vary from $2000 - $10000, depending on your needs and requirements. Of course, all these prices can go higher according to what level of functionality you tend to provide.

We may clearly see that the development of Laravel development can cost more compared with WordPress. Yet, when you deal with extended projects that get bigger and bigger with time, Laravel will help you to save a lot of money and time on support.

When it comes to the speed of the website, Laravel wins because WordPress needs to load a lot of plugins. Each WordPress plugin can load different types of scripts, which, in their turn, take more time and make it slower. Below I’m going to introduce a table where you may see when to choose Laravel or WordPress depending on the specific features you want to include on your website.

To Sum Up

We already discussed the pros and cons of both Laravel and WordPress, so you get the appropriate knowledge to decide on your choice. In the end, I just need to make a clarification. If you want to make a simple content-based website, go with WordPress. However, in case you want to build a web application that should provide a lot of high functionality, you need to choose Laravel. Good Luck!