Laravel vs. WordPress: Comparing the Titans of Web Development

Laravel vs WordPress

We know that a web development job requires technical and logical skills which will help you to build the digital presence of your brand or business. And the heart of it lies in the technology chosen to accomplish the project. The wrong choice of technology can ruin the website or increase development time and stretch the budget. To avoid this, it is important to select the best technology for a website or web application development. Nowadays, Laravel and WordPress are two of the most used technologies for web development. In the article, we will discuss both in detail and give an honest account of Laravel vs. WordPress to help you figure out which one is best for your project.

What is Laravel?

Laravel is an open-source web development framework, written in PHP, and works on Model-View-Controller architecture. Basically, used to develop the backend, and it is useful for executing the logical part or business rules with the database. Used by large-scale enterprises, Laravel requires some coding knowledge of HTML, CSS, and PHP to create a web application. Certainly not for beginners, it is for seasoned developers. Although it occupies a small market share, it offers absolute stability and security to websites. With various in-built Laravel Developer tools to pace up web application development, it is one of the most sought-after technologies for enterprise applications and eCommerce websites.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is the most used Content Management System for small and medium-scale websites and occupies more than 40% of the market share. Being an open-source CMS that evolves continuously, this one requires no technical knowledge. With hundreds of easy-to-customize, free templates, themes, and plugins, WordPress offers ease of website development and is suitable even for beginners. So, WordPress proves to be a versatile CMS used for building all kinds of websites.

Laravel vs. WordPress – What are the similarities?

In their capacities, both these technologies can be utilized to build feature-rich, fully-functional websites. Both offer excellent user experiences and have some technical similarities which are listed as follows.

  • Both are free, open-source technologies
  • Written in PHP
  • Help to build fast, flexible, custom websites
  • Use object-oriented structure
  • Have online communities that frequently come up with new features

Laravel vs. WordPress: Head-to-Head Comparison

Along with many similarities, both technologies have some differences as well. Likewise, each has distinguished features, which are listed as follows:

Accessibility

Accessibility signifies ease of use. For a Laravel-based site, you need to have knowledge of reading and writing code. It is not for layman and requires technical background to create a site. On the other hand, WordPress requires zero coding knowledge and has a small learning curve. The CMS can be customized, altered, and modified by the layman to build a basic website.

Here, WordPress is a clear winner!

Search Engine Optimization

WordPress has in-built SEO features which help it build an SEO-friendly, high-ranking website. With Laravel, you need to create an SEO structure from scratch. However, they have in-built SEO packages but they cannot compete with the SEO functionality of WordPress. Most Laravel sites rank high due to their fast loading capacity and not SEO. So, in the battle of Laravel vs. WordPress SEO, WordPress clearly wins in delivering high-ranking websites!

eCommerce

Laravel comes with several built-in packages Aimeos, Bagisto, and Mage2 for eCommerce. They can be customized to create unique features however; it requires quite a lot of coding effort. WordPress’s open-source eCommerce plugin called WooCommerce powers nearly 5 million online stores. Incorporate more add-ons to create more features to build a competitive eCommerce store.

WordPress is simpler when it’s about WordPress vs. Laravel eCommerce.

Security

Laravel is more secure than WordPress. The free plugins and themes offered by WordPress, are quite vulnerable to cyber threats. In terms of security, Laravel is a clear winner.

CMS

While WordPress is a fully-fledged CMS that can be customized with simple clicks and drag-and-drop methods, Laravel is a framework based on MVC architecture. Most small and medium-scale sites are made in WordPress to leverage its CMS-based advantages. WP has the upper hand over Laravel in terms of the CMS calibre.

Extensions and Plugins

Being open source, WordPress has a huge community of developers that keep building new plugins and themes. While WordPress has thousands of plugins and themes that can be customized to create sites, Laravel offers features, packages, and libraries to create tailor-made sites.

Here, again WP wins over Laravel. 

Design

Laravel has a few free, customizable packages that can be altered to create a wonderful web design. Unlike that, WordPress has nearly 4000 themes that can be altered for better layout, fonts, colour, etc. Building unique web pages is made possible with the Page Builder plugin. Again, WordPress beats Laravel, especially for the convenience it offers for web design.

Popularity

It is the time of DIYs and website development is no exception. Most individual sites and small business sites are developed by laymen with absolutely no idea of coding. WordPress makes it easy with its CMS-based components. This is the biggest reason for its popularity and makes it a unanimous choice of 42% of all website owners. Laravel on the other hand, is chosen by less than 1% of the population as it requires coding.

In terms of Laravel vs. WordPress, the latter is far more popular than the former.

When to Use WordPress?

Whenever you want to build theme based website with customized plugins to add features.

The following are the most common uses of WordPress

  • WordPress is used for building blogs and SEO-friendly websites.
  • To build an online portfolio or individual site with little complication.
  • A news portal with extensive content
  • A small or medium-sized eCommerce store
  • TechCrunch, BBC America, and The Next Web are popular WP sites.

When to Use Laravel?

Laravel offers a structure or framework to build elaborate web applications that demand precise customization and incorporate intricate business logic.

The following are the most common uses of Laravel

  • Layered, scalable, complex web applications
  • Strong backend systems
  • Huge eCommerce stores with thousands of products
  • Sites that need to be built from scratch.
  • Futuristic web applications
  • Enterprise applications and websites
  • For a site that demands programming-level features like object-relational mapping and APIs.

Can Laravel and WordPress Be Used Together?

Yes, they work well in combination. As Laravel can be used to build frontend web design, smart developers use WordPress to simplify the backend and Laravel to create the UI part. One of the most used combinations is Corcel.

Corcel

It is an open-source package to assimilate WP and Laravel. The package uses Laravel models to extract content from the WP database. Here, WordPress will work as a backend or the admin panel.

Which is Better for Your Web Development? Laravel or WordPress

WordPress is an undisputed king and blogging platform for managing content and even offers enterprise applications through WordPress VIP. However, Laravel has some advantages over it. Being a solid framework, it is chosen to fulfil specific requirements, which can’t be met by WordPress.

When you want a flexible, scalable, secure web application, choose Laravel over WP. You can either hire Laravel Development Companies or need experienced ones in your team. If you have a good budget, then Laravel is better as it is expensive to hostF.

WordPress development is for simple, less complex sites that demand no coding. If that suffices your business, then WP is best for you. It builds quick sites with SEO-friendly features. When you have a low budget, WordPress is best for you.

Interesting Facts about WordPress

  • WordPress powers more than 40% of websites on the Internet.
  • Released in 2003, it is the most popular CMS of all time.
  • Chosen by tech giants like Facebook, Google, and The Guardian, it has proved its competence.
  • It offers multi-lingual sites.
  • WordPress is older than Facebook and Twitter.
  • Used by government applications.

Interesting Facts about Laravel

  • Very flexible, easy to configure
  • Does unit testing while writing the code
  • The stable version was released in 2011
  • PHP framework for the solid backend and flexible frontend
  • Useful for building complex websites.

To sum up, we have tried to deliver relevant information concisely. We have discussed the pros and cons of both – Laravel and WordPress. Hope it helps you narrow down the funnel and choose the best out of Laravel vs. WordPress. Feel free to connect with us for discussion, queries, and details of web development.

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