A common dilemma that many people find themselves stuck upon is which one they should choose, WordPress or Laravel. This article is going to help you decide that in the battle of the two most popular technologies: WordPress Vs. Laravel, which one will be the winner and a better fit for your business requirements.

One of the toughest and most important decisions that business owners have to make before building their online platform is which technology they should choose to build their website upon. For a business, an office is the physical part of its identity from where business is commenced. Similarly, a website is the digital part of its identity that people visit to get information about the business and the services it offers and to enjoy its services online.

In today’s age, numerous alternatives are available. Each one is differently developed to cater to the specific requirements of businesses of different kinds. It makes it very hard to settle on one. Business owners need to keep their budget, requirements, and long-term goals in mind while making a decision. Let’s understand WordPress and Laravel in detail and see which one would be a better choice for you.

What is WordPress?

WordPress was initially released as a blogging platform in 2003. It is now the most powerful Content Management System (CMS) on the internet powering 42% of the entire web alone. A CMS is a pre-built software that allows its users to create, edit, publish and manage content which includes text, images, and videos very easily and efficiently. WordPress has grown much larger than just a blogging platform and has become a full-fledged CMS that can extend its functionality to perform complex operations needed by a web app.

What is Laravel?

Laravel was first released in 2011. By far, it is the most powerful and robust PHP web framework available in the market. It can take the development of your project to a whole new level. Thus, with powerful features like the Blade template engine, Artisan command-line interface, and built-in database management system; it makes developing complex applications very easy for Laravel developers. Its popularity has grown over the last couple of years making it the first choice for developing complex applications on PHP.

Similarities Between WordPress and Laravel

Although this article is to help you understand the differences between WordPress and Laravel, you also need to know that there are many similarities between the two, are as follows;

  • open-source technologies
  • written in PHP language
  • developed in object-oriented programming pattern
  • extremely flexible, customizable, and extendible
  • pre-loaded with tons of pre-built functionalities that can be implemented readily
  • popular and backed up by huge supportive developer communities

WordPress Vs. Laravel

Let’s understand this in a more comprehensible way. A website is a virtual office or workplace for a business and hence its foundation and working is also very similar to that of the physical one. A typical business needs a physical office that needs a piece of land to be built upon. A building is constructed upon the land, then the building’s interior is decided, rooms, sections, and sub-sections are made, and then products are showcased.

Using WordPress to create your website is like getting a pre-constructed building and setting up your office in it by redesigning the interior, installing pre-built furniture and inventory, and customizing the look and feel of the office. Whereas using Laravel for your website’s development is like constructing the whole building for your office, designing rooms, sections, and sub-sections, designing, creating, and installing the furniture and inventory, doing all this by yourself, and then showcasing products.

  • WordPress is a very easy-to-use CMS with which a website can be set up and deployed within a short period by anyone.
  • WordPress website’s UI and site structure can be easily changed and customized by installing and modifying pre-built themes.
  • The WordPress website’s functionality can be easily extended by installing pre-built plugins.
  • With WordPress, content can be managed very easily with the help of an easy-to-use UI.

Whereas,

  • Laravel is a framework that requires expertise to use, not everyone can use it. It is used to build web apps from scratch.
  • Laravel uses the Blade template engine for the front end of a web app but needs to develop the UI from scratch.
  • Laravel is packed with several PHP libraries and offers features like authorization, authentication, inversion of control, etc. Any kind of custom functionality has to be developed from scratch.
  • Content management is not easy with Laravel.

Other Features of WordPress and Laravel

  • WordPress is based on an event-triggered development architecture (which means that if *this* happens then do *this*). Laravel uses model-view-controller development architecture.
  • WordPress has a shallow learning curve and anyone can learn it within a short period. Laravel, on the other hand, is complex, its learning curve is steep and it takes a lot of time and effort to learn.
  • WordPress is by default developed to be SEO friendly allowing marketers to plan their marketing strategies and implement them easily. However, Laravel needs custom development of applications requiring a lot of effort to achieve even a little for SEO.

WordPress development can also be done by writing custom code which makes it extremely flexible. But as the functional complexity of requirements increases, the amount of effort needed increases exponentially. In Laravel development, the ease of implementation stays linear with the increase in functional complexity of requirements.

WordPress vs Laravel

  • Core WordPress is fast but as more and more extensions are added to the website, it gets overloaded and becomes slow. However, Laravel is built with Symfony 2 allowing reusability of code making it capable of handling high loads easily and efficiently.
  • It is very hard to maintain the custom code in WordPress. On the other hand, Laravel’s MVC structure makes maintenance much easier.
  • Creating and customizing new databases is very complex with WordPress. Whereas Laravel uses Eloquent, an Object Relationship Mapper (ORM), making it very easy to manage and interact with databases.

WordPress Vs. Laravel: Comparative Analysis

Parameter Winner
WordPress Laravel
Ease of Use ✔ Very easy to get started with. Anyone can learn fast and put it to use. The code needs in-depth learning to implement. Expertise in development is required.
Speed With changes in theme and increase in the number of plugins, a website becomes heavy making it slower. ✔ Manages operations efficiently and maintains functioning at high speeds.
Performance As the functional complexity increases, the performance of the website drops, if not managed properly. ✔ Handles heavy loads and complex operations effectively.
Security Third-party plugins and themes are extensively used making it vulnerable to numerous risks and threats. ✔ Developed on top of advanced built-in security features like authentication and authorization making it secure from threats.
Scalability Upscaling is a huge problem. Adding more plugins hampers the performance and making custom code changes is much more complex. ✔ Can be developed, updated, and modified freely as per the requirements making scaling very easy.
Cost-effective ✔ Is free to use by yourself and custom development costs are low due to market saturation. Needs expert developers to use it effectively making the development costs high.
Development Time ✔ Can be developed, customized, and deployed in a very short period. As a project is to be built from scratch, it takes more time to plan and implement.
SEO ✔ All the basic SEO is done and it is built to be SEO friendly by default. Takes a lot of work to develop functionalities to manage SEO.
Community ✔ WordPress developers’ community is huge and supportive. Has a large developer community but smaller than that of WordPress.

WordPress and Laravel, both offer huge sets of functionalities. Thus, the selection of one depends on the requirements of your business.

Business Situations Where A WordPress Website Suits Best

If you need

  • a brochure/informative website to build your online presence for your small or medium-sized business like Clinic, Yoga Studio, Coaching Institute, Café, Salon, Gym, etc.
  • an online portfolio for your profession like photography, videography, graphic design, law, content writing, audio/video/photo editing, IT services, Digital marketing services, etc.
  • a landing page for your webinar
  • a blog
  • an SEO friendly website
  • a small to medium-sized E-commerce store (Can be opened very easily with a plugin called WooCommerce)
  • a news portal

In all these situations WordPress is the better choice for you. WordPress is the go-to option when the audience of the platform isn’t going to be huge. It is best to use in the situation when content consumption by the audience is going to be high and interaction from the client-side is going to be low, like a Blog, News Portal, Portfolio, etc.

WordPress can also easily handle a medium amount of load on websites with complex functionality like E-commerce stores.

Business Situations Where A Laravel Website Suits Best

If you need

  • a complex system with custom-built functionalities
  • a highly flexible system
  • a system capable of handling a huge audience
  • a system on which interaction from the client-side is going to be very high like a social media platform
  • a powerful and dynamic back-end for web or mobile applications
  • a highly scalable system

In all these situations Laravel is the better choice for you. Laravel is the go-to option when the audience of the platform is going to be huge. Laravel is the best choice when speed and performance are your priorities. It can easily power large systems like social media platforms, MISs, CRMs, and any other kind of system. Thus, it needs to handle a huge amount of load without hampering the performance and speed of the system.

Conclusion

Laravel Vs. WordPress; both are very flexible, pragmatic, and popular platforms but are very different from each other. Both have their pros and cons and you can use both to develop the same kind of system. However, the selection of one completely depends on the budget, scale, audience, and other long-term goals of your business.

You can get started right now and build your digital office by yourself. But, if you want to have an impactful system that can serve for the benefit of your business then you should take the help of experienced designers and craftsmen. If WordPress is the one that best suits your business requirements then here is the list of top WordPress development companies that can help you build a perfect website for your business. If Laravel seems a better fit for your business plan then here is the list of top Laravel development companies that can help you build a powerful system capable of fulfilling your business needs.