Laravel or WordPress – which one to choose for your website?

Hey! This article is for site owners and for those who want to launch their Online project or Internet service. Well, if you came up with some kind of micro-startup or need a website to serve your business, then this article is for you.

There is such a “problem” in the website development market… Often, when we are asked to develop or modify a website, and we start to analyze the patient, the first thing we see is strategic mistakes. What are we talking about?

Don’t make a strategic mistake when creating your project

Well, for example, we all know that Wordpres is no longer just a blogging engine, and even a site with a complex structure can be developed on WordPress. Right? Have you heard about it? And probably because of this opinion, some people decide to develop such complex projects on WordPress that over time they come to such a complexity of the site that it becomes impossible to maintain it from the technical side.

And then the development turns into a real “Hell for the developer”. The simplest functions take a long time to implement. New developers refuse to take the project to work, because this is not a project, but “real Chaos” in terms of code. And what should the owner of the site do with such a situation?

In order not to come into such a situation in the future, it is important to make strategically correct decisions. Since such situations are exclusively the result of strategic mistakes, not tactical ones. Now we will describe our opinion on this matter from the side of a developer who has experience in developing projects with complex business logic.

A few important points for a basic understanding

When Should You Choose Laravel PHP Framework Over WordPress CMS? The answer to this question will be obvious if you understand the structure of the project, which is planned to come to in the future. You should also at least superficially know the advantages of both systems.

Laravel is NOT a CMS with an admin area. It is a PHP framework that simplifies the development of complex and highly loaded systems for a PHP developer. Therefore, the admin panel, and any functions, modules for the site will need to be written by the developer from scratch. This may take a very long time. However, in practice, it becomes possible to implement almost any functionality – it depends on the level of development and training of the developer.

It should also be understood that Laravel does not have the ability to quickly install some kind of “plugin” or “module” in order to implement even standard functionality. Often, all functionality must be written from scratch. However, the life of a developer can be made easier by “packages” that will help to implement partially the desired functionality.

It may seem that Laravel is too complicated, long and expensive. And partly there is some truth in this. However, this truth is very relative.

Laravel developers do tend to cost more than WP specialists. But this is solely due to the fact that such specialists usually have a higher level of technical training than typical WordPress specialists. Of course, there are exceptions.

What advantage does Laravel have over WordPress?

An important advantage of Laravel over WordPress is that Laravel allows you to develop a website with absolutely any functionality and not be limited to WordPress features. Of course, many WordPress experts can say that any functionality can be implemented on the WordPress CMS, since the CMS also runs on PHP. But here’s the thing…

Often, the code of complex WordPress projects turns into such a “mess” that it becomes difficult to work with. Again, there are exceptions in practice.

Why does Laravel not have such complexity with the code? Note that there are also exceptions. Because there are certain standards in the Laravel developer community that are used in development. Moreover, Laravel projects usually have higher requirements for code quality, since this code requires maintenance and support. It is important to understand that the transition to Laravel is the transition to a new level of development in all respects.

And for a developer, switching to Laravel is also a transition to a new level. In this regard, when a developer starts working with Laravel, he inevitably faces the fact that the quality of the code needs to be improved. Such a developer begins to learn a lot of new information on programming, and over time, the level of the developer and the quality of his code grows. This is the reason for the higher level of training of Laravel developers.

Why are we all this…

Yes, if the project involves complex logic and complex functionality, then it is better to choose Laravel and more professional developers.

  • If the project is planned as a CRM system, a complex online store, an Internet service, a marketplace, a social network, an ad site or a complex catalog, we highly recommend choosing Laravel.
  • If the project involves active work of users in a personal account or some complex operations with data, we highly recommend choosing Laravel.
  • If the project involves a high load on servers and high attendance, we highly recommend choosing Laravel.
  • If the project needs multiple integrations with other Internet services, we highly recommend choosing Laravel.

Now we will give a number of technical advantages of Laravel, which can become a weighty argument:

  1. The ability to use automatic tests – allows you to improve the stability of the site when rolling out new functionality and a new version of the site. If one of the tests does not work, then a new version with such an error simply should not be published. WP doesn’t have autotests.
  2. Task queue – allows you to run complex processes in the background exactly at the moment when the server is idle. Such a task queue works out of the box in Laravel and does not require complex configuration. On WP, you need to set up and use Cron.
  3. Using a reactive frontend framework to serve the front visual part of the site. Such reactive frameworks allow you to achieve higher quality code and make the site more interactive and dynamic.
  4. WebSockets out of the box for updating data online. This is often just necessary for things like Live Chat, a dynamic Live Chart on a website, or something similar.
  5. The ability to get faster loading of the site, since the pages will use only those scripts that are really needed. There is also the possibility of improved work with queries to the database.

Is it possible to develop a website with a personal account on WordPress?

Of course, it is possible to develop a website with a personal account on WordPress. For this, there are even various plugins that can be easily installed. However, it is important to understand that as soon as the need arises to increase the functionality in such a personal account, it is likely that the developer will start writing “crutches”. Such plugins for personal accounts solve very narrow and specific tasks.

The typical WordPress developer will find it difficult to implement event listening or real-time data updates.

Also, when developing on WordPress, a situation often arises when something else breaks during the development of one functionality. And this is sometimes extremely difficult to test and discover. This situation arises due to the lack of automated tests in WordPress, and also due to the lack of practice in writing tests by WordPress developers.

If the functionality of the project requires you to perform tasks in the background or in a queue, at a time when the server is not loaded, then a typical WordPress developer will start using Cron. There is nothing wrong with this. However, the question arises: why use such things when the PHP framework has provided for such situations and already has a task queue out of the box.

Complex Internet project on WordPress

It is certainly possible to create a complex Internet project on WordPress. However, there is a high probability that you will end up in a situation in which the most correct solution would be to rewrite all the code from scratch in a PHP framework. And if there are suspicions that a similar situation may arise with your project, then maybe you should avoid strategic mistakes and make the right decision right away, without waiting for “get hit on the forehead with a rake”?

Advantages of WordPress over Laravel

A number of advantages of WordPress over Laravel that are undeniable in some specific cases.

You need to understand that WordPress allows you to quickly launch a landing page, a catalog site, or even an online store. WP will allow you to choose a beautiful template from ready-made options, adapt it for SEO promotion and start promoting or launching ads.

There are a lot of inexpensive WordPress specialists on the market who will be happy to assemble your site on the Elementor constructor or even make layouts from Figma or Photoshop.

However, there are a number of associated disadvantages.

Disadvantages of WordPress

We will describe a number of shortcomings of WordPress and WordPress developers regarding Laravel and Laravel specialists. We will describe only our opinion. At the same time, it is possible to meet exceptions in the market of specialists.

  1. Low responsibility of WordPress specialists in relation to the entire programming market.
  2. Low level of technical training and competence of WordPress specialists
  3. Restrictions in the implementation of technical functionality. This will not affect your project if it does not require solving complex technical problems.
  4. Be prepared for low technical execution of the project
  5. Difficulties arise when building custom functionality if the business requires it.
  6. Difficulties in adapting the site to high loads

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