Laravel vs Wordpress - which one you choose for next project?

Today, in the PHP world, developers have two major choices. One is the content management system that is WordPress or second is a PHP framework called Laravel. Most of the developers love WordPress due to its pre-built CMS that might seem time/money saver and it is an obvious tool in that term to achieve business tasks. However, it's really better to use a CMS rather than the typical modern framework like Laravel development framework but Laravel offers more custom stuff while WordPress is a plug and play process.

Here, in this post, we explore the most important difference between WordPress and Laravel that you should know for your development projects.

So, let's get started -

Laravel

Laravel is the best framework to build web applications of any scale with only a few developers on hand. It suits startups and large companies alike. It's a free, open-source PHP web framework, created by Taylor Otwell and intended for the development of web applications following the model–view–controller (MVC) architectural pattern and based on Symfony.  Laravel's first beta release was made available on June 9, 2011, followed by the Laravel 1 release later in the same month.

Some of the features of Laravel are a modular packaging system with a dedicated dependency manager, different ways for accessing relational databases, utilities that aid in application deployment and maintenance, and its orientation toward syntactic sugar. The source code of Laravel is hosted on GitHub and licensed under the terms of MIT License.

WordPress

WordPress is also a powerful PHP framework and it was originally developed by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little on May 27, 2003. Basically, it's free and an open source content management system that is based on PHP and MySQL. Features include a plugin architecture and a template system. It is most associated with blogging but supports other types of web content including more traditional mailing lists and forums, media galleries, and online stores. WordPress is the most popular website management system in use. As of April 2018, it used by more than 60 million websites, including 30.6% of the top 10 million websites.

WordPress vs Laravel

• WordPress is a popular Content Management System (CMS) and Laravel itself is a 'framework'.

• Creating and managing your website is simple with WordPress. It's a powerful platform to get started in minutes and make changes to your site easily.

• Laravel utilizes the best possible PHP standards and coding practices.

• While the WordPress software itself is free, you need a domain name and web hosting to install it.

• Laravel uses many widely-accepted community libraries and builds upon them, rather than re-inventing everything.

• WordPress is constantly being improved, with new features added, because of the community code-sourcing aspect.

• Laravel has many components available from the community and is extremely easy to build custom components for, either with custom code or by integrating existing third-party PHP libraries.

• Laravel is flexible enough to power pretty much any kind of application.

• In WordPress, security vulnerabilities are continually being patched to keep it secure.

• While the documentation is great, Laravel is still incomplete. There are many methods and helper functions that are exposed but not documented.

• WordPress has the best plugin repository, by far. So, anytime you have a needed new feature for your website, there is usually a plugin that already exists to allow you to do what you're wanting.

• Laravel has a pretty big community of supporters getting your query solved faster and easier. Migrating databases is also easier with it. It takes security as an important part of its development also.

• If you are poor in programming or you are not a good developer then you should go for WordPress rather than Laravel, considering only the technical aspect.

• WordPress is written using standard compliance high-quality code and produces semantic markup. In non-geek terms, this makes Google and other search engines love WordPress.

• Laravel uses Composer as a dependency manager to add framework-agnostic and Laravel-specific PHP packages available from the Packagist repository.

• WordPress is very SEO friendly out of the box. You can also use WordPress SEO plugins to further optimize your website.

• In Laravel, Eloquent ORM (object-relational mapping) is an advanced PHP implementation of the active record pattern, providing at the same time internal methods for enforcing constraints on the relationships between database objects.

• WordPress comes with a built-in updates management system. This allows you to update your plugins and themes from within your WordPress admin dashboard.

• In Laravel, restful controllers provide an optional way for separating the logic behind serving HTTP GET and POST requests.

• WordPress is not just limited to writing text. It comes with a built-in media uploader to handle images, audio, and video files.

• Website developed using Laravel will have good loading speed when compared with WordPress.

• WordPress is much better at dealing with a lot of content that the future website is to hold. Also, if the owner of that website does not possess strong technical skills, it will make it easier to manage the posts later on.

• Laravel more or less mandates the use of Object Oriented Programming. Which means you will have to distribute your code in terms of objects and classes. There is a large number of high-quality packages available which will definitely speed up your overall development.

 

The bottom line is that it depends upon the kind of application you are building and how complex it is. In general, you can get almost everything coded on the top of WordPress. But if time isn't a constraint, you could definitely code it better with Laravel.

You can share your experiences with us in the comment section. Thank you!