One of the important things a business owner should be aware of is the need for a website. There are several platforms to choose from when it comes to creating a website, and the choice between WordPress vs Laravel is one of the most important aspects of your website.
It is easy to pay attention to the designs and the website’s overall appearance, but you need to take care of many other things.
This blog compares the two platforms, looking at your choices depending on your needs and the features each platform offers.
What is Laravel?
Laravel is a web application framework with expressive and elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in most web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.
Laravel is accessible yet powerful, providing tools for large, robust applications. A superb inversion of control container, expressive migration system, and tightly integrated unit testing support give you the tools you need to build any application you are tasked with.
Benefits of a Laravel Website:
1. Model Factories
Laravel Model Factories allow you to easily create stubbed-out models with all the relationships and methods required to interact with them. This will enable you to focus on testing business logic instead of spending time manually creating test data. This feature lets you define models in the database. Then, using the code-generation tool of Laravel, create a model class for each model you can use in your application.
2. Blade Templating Engine
The Blade templating engine helps in creating dynamic templates for web pages and emails with ease. A blade acts differently, unlike other PHP frameworks that use plain HTML to generate dynamic content. Blade uses template inheritance and layouts to separate presentation code from application logic, resulting in cleaner and more maintainable code.
3. Eloquent ORM
One of the most popular features of Laravel is its excellent ORM (Object Relational Mapping). Eloquent makes it easy to interact with databases using PHP without writing a lot of code. This makes it easier for developers to create powerful applications quickly and efficiently.
4. Artisan CLI
Artisan is a command-line interface (CLI) tool that helps you manage your Laravel application. It combines some of the common tasks you might want to perform on your server into simple commands.
5. MVC Architecture Pattern
Laravel uses the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern to separate business logic from presentation logic and data storage layers, which makes it easier for developers to follow best practices when building websites with this framework.
6. Dependency Injection Container
Dependency injection is a software design pattern that removes hard-coded dependencies and makes it possible to change them, whether at run time or compile time. The Laravel dependency injection container is based on Symfony’s service container, which means you get all the features of a mature, battle-tested dependency injection container with first-class support for autowiring.
7. Package Development
Packages are the primary means of adding functionality to Laravel. These packages may have routes, controllers, views, and configuration, in addition to migrations that provide enhancements for a Laravel application.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is a free, open-source content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. According to W3Techs data, WordPress is used by over 40% of all websites in 2022. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License, which means it is free to use, modify and distribute.
The CMS enables users to edit content using a web browser. WordPress has various features, including a plugin architecture and a template system. WordPress also features integrated link management, search engine optimization, spell checking, page preview, and editor style, allowing users to format posts before publishing them.
Benefits of a WordPress Website:
1. Short learning curve
WordPress is a very user-friendly platform that allows you to set up a website quickly. There are also great tutorials and support forums. The learning curve for WordPress is short compared to other web platforms, which means there’s less time spent learning how to use it.
2. Customizable to fit your business needs
The platform has thousands of themes and plugins to change your site’s look and feel giving you a lot to choose from. These options allow you to create a unique website that matches your company’s brand identity perfectly.
3. Secure and regularly updated
The open-source nature of WordPress means that it’s easy to find solutions for any problems you encounter. And if you need help, thousands of community members can assist you with your website.
4. Sites are a breeze to maintain
WordPress makes it easy to update your site content and keep your site fresh. You can easily add new pages or posts whenever you want or need them by clicking an icon on your dashboard.
5. Huge library of plugins that extend the functionality of your site
WordPress has a huge library of plugins that extend the functionality of your site. There are tens of thousands of free and premium plugins available for download. You can find plugins for anything from ecommerce to social media integration to contact forms. It’s easy to install and manage plugins from the dashboard area of your WordPress website.
6. Wide range of themes to choose from
WordPress themes are templates that define how your website will look like. They include things like colors, fonts, layouts and other design elements that change how your site looks in every browser window and on every device (desktop, tablet or mobile).
WordPress vs Laravel: Key differences
1. WordPress vs Laravel: Performance
Laravel is faster than WordPress due to its less complex code and more streamlined structure. Additionally, Laravel can be deployed with built-in caching, which allows for a greater performance boost.
Even though it is faster and lightweight, WordPress can sometimes slow down due to its complex codebase. However, there are ways to speed up WordPress using caching plugins and optimizing database size on start-up.
2. WordPress vs Laravel: Accessibility
WordPress is a good CMS for beginners because it has a simple structure and is easy to use. It also has a big community that can help you get started quickly. However, it has some limitations which might not be suitable for complex projects with many features.
Laravel is more difficult to use than WordPress because it requires you to learn programming languages, but it has much more power and flexibility. With Laravel, you can create even complex websites and applications, and you can do so in a short amount of time.
3. WordPress vs Laravel: Design
WordPress is one of the most customizable web design platforms available. It has over 4,000 free themes to choose from in addition to thousands of premium themes and nearly endless customization abilities. You can build or buy a template or theme for your site, but when you edit it yourself, you’re working on the front end. Building your own templates is an option for experienced developers working with the back end of a website.
Laravel provides great customization options that users can use for their design templates. Many even come for free and have more varied and interesting features. But many developers prefer to use premium templates that are more advanced than what is available for Laravel core. If you have a good developer working on the platform, Larevel can be a powerful design platform.
4. WordPress vs Laravel: Ecommerce
WordPress is an excellent eCommerce platform, with many plugins available to make it even better. WooCommerce is the most popular WordPress eCommerce plugin. It’s free and paid, but the free version has all the necessary features. With a wide range of extensions and add-ons, you can configure it to work almost any way you want it to.
Laravel is a robust platform with the tools needed for eCommerce-related tasks. You can find multiple packages for specific eCommerce needs, such as Aimeos or Bagisto, which provide excellent features for your next project. However, Laravel cannot compete with a more widely-used tool like WooCommerce regarding eCommerce specifics.
5. WordPress vs Laravel: SEO
WordPress has many SEO features and plugins to ensure that your website ranks well in the search engines. WordPress SEO allows you to optimize your website for search engines and social media. You can easily add meta descriptions, titles, shortcodes, and more with one click.
Setting up SEO on a Laravel site is not an easy task. Every route you want to optimize for search engines must be defined. There are free tools available to streamline SEO efforts. However, you cannot rely on these tools alone. There is no native SEO support for Laravel, so if you don’t use them, you will struggle with managing SEO.
What would you choose between Laravel and WordPress?
WordPress is easy to set up and use. It has an easy-to-implement system for search engine optimization, with little need for developers to increase organic traffic numbers. This can represent a significant advantage for companies with limited experience hiring in-house SEO staff.
Conversely, Laravel requires more development time, but it also allows you to create a more specific and tailored site experience through routing systems within the parameters of a carefully planned framework.
Here’s what you can do:
- Choose WordPress if you blogs, news portal and for creating small to medium sized websites.
- Choose Laravel for creating large sized websites, complex web apps that involve complex backends systems and custom product design.
- Choose a hybrid framework of WordPress and Laravel if you want familiarity and ease of using WordPress along with streamlined workflow of Laravel.
Hire The Best WordPress Web Developer In India For Your Business Needs
Hiring a WordPress developer can be a complicated task. Always go for someone who knows what they are doing rather than the company that charges the lowest rate. Hiring from an outsourced company is a great option for hiring quality developers with experience working on real-world projects.
You’ll have easy access to a large pool of experienced developers when hiring through an agency. They can understand your business goals and objectives and quickly take care of your specific workloads well so that you can focus on your core competency – running your business well.
FAQs
- Why is WordPress the best platform for web development?
WordPress is easy to use, and you can easily make your content SEO-friendly. Even the coding behind any theme can also be made SEO-friendly.
- Is WordPress built with Laravel?
You have the option to integrate WordPress with Laravel.
- Do professional web developers use WordPress?
Most web developers use WordPress, but not all websites are made on WordPress.
- Is WordPress better than coding?
WordPress websites have an underlying CMS that makes it easy to manage content and make changes to the site. HTML sites don’t have software making them difficult to manage.