The Question: WordPress or Laravel?
You're at a crossroads. On one side, WordPress, powering over 40% of the web, a familiar giant. On the other, Laravel, the elegant framework beloved by developers for crafting custom applications. Both are titans in their own right, but they serve different masters and solve different problems. Choosing incorrectly can lead to bloated plugins, over-engineered solutions, and frustrated clients.
This isn't just a technical rundown; it's a journey through real-world scenarios, drawing on years of experience building with both. We'll explore the TL;DR, the nuances, and those moments you wish you'd picked the other path.
Use Cases: Matching the Tool to the Task
When WordPress Wins
I usually recommend WordPress whenever a client needs a site that isn't too complicated, the scope's not too large, and it's only for a short project duration. Ultimately WordPress works really well when there's not a lot of data involved.
The type of data is also a key factor; for example if it's blog posts which WordPress handles well then obviously you're going to choose WordPress, aren't you, because it does blogs-that's what it does. It's a no-brainer for sites heavy on editorial content.
- Blog-centric websites
- Hotel and travel websites with standard listing formats
- Projects with significant editorial workflows
- Clients who need to manage content without deep technical knowledge
- Situations where frontend presentation and page builders (like Bricks or Kadence with Gutenberg) are key
Ultimately the decision to use WordPress is usually a fairly easy one because the types of client drive that decision. If there are editorial staff who aren't keen on complex interfaces, WordPress's user-friendly design and vast community support make it a winner. Even an overwhelming admin panel can be managed with good tutorials and onboarding.
When Laravel Shines Brightest
With Laravel the considerations are a little bit different; I would generally start by assessing the data that the client needs to manage within the site. If you're dealing with a lot of internal, unstructured, or highly relational data, Laravel becomes the clear choice.
Think API-first applications, custom dashboards, or systems with intricate business logic. Laravel is a very niche application, something that's usually familiar to developers and agencies, not so much direct clients.
- Complex, custom data models and relationships
- Applications requiring robust, multi-tiered user authentication and permissions
- Projects where test-driven development (TDD) is a priority
- Systems needing scalable queue and job management
- API-first development or custom admin interfaces
If you want to build a highly customized data driven app within WordPress you're essentially building out an entire new framework on top of the foundation, which is often counterproductive. Laravel provides these foundational elements, like robust authentication with Breeze and flexible authorization with Gates, right out of the box.
Tales from the Trenches: Real-World Examples
WordPress in Action: A Healthcare Content Hub
A website I built for an American healthcare company, where their focus was on front end presentation, illustrates a classic WordPress win. They had a number of different data types; one of them was resources which spanned video, downloadable PDFs, blog posts, and external articles. While diverse, these types were structurally similar enough for WordPress to handle gracefully. Something like Laravel wouldn't necessarily have added anything when it comes to managing that.
WordPress's built-in media library and native document management were significant advantages. There's a lot you get with WordPress straight out of the box, and that means a lot. Crucially, the client was also familiar with WordPress already so that's usually a massive selling point.
Laravel's Power: A Local Council App
Conversely, a legacy Laravel app for a local council showcased Laravel's strengths. They were already using Laravel and it had been suggested to them as a way of building a highly customized interface to manage their specific data requirements. The system involved authentication from multiple different types of users and complex process steps.
This meant a lot of different pathways through the code, a lot of different logic, and ultimately a lot of different things that needed to be kept track of, tested, and maintained-this is something that WordPress would really have struggled with. Modifying WordPress user roles to this extent isn't entirely intuitive from a development point of view and quickly becomes a pain. Laravel, with its built-in testing and auth libraries, handled this complexity with ease. For instance, one user required the ability to progress a document through a pipeline while another needed to review that document and change its status accordingly – a workflow tailor-made for Laravel.
Admin & Editorial: The User Experience Angle
Client control and familiarity often steer the decision. The WordPress admin is a known quantity; clients love control, WP admin is familiar, Laravel is… whatever you build. That familiarity is a double-edged sword.
WordPress: The Comfort of Familiarity
Clients have usually heard of it, used it, or know someone who has. This is often why editorial teams specifically request WordPress. They know that if they run into trouble, a good deal of the time they can just Google it and the answer will be there. For them, a bespoke Laravel interface means a single point of contact: the developer.
The Story Exchange, a news website I supported, valued WordPress because it gave them the tools immediately; it didn't expect much of them. Adding new Gutenberg blocks or ACF fields integrated smoothly into their existing flow. It’s about autonomy: adding posts, uploading images, updating blurbs – no dev required, no deploy pipeline.
Laravel: Bespoke Control, Tailored Workflow
With Laravel, one of the things you have to build from the Ground Up is the administration interface. This isn't necessarily a drawback. Tools like Backpack for Laravel offer a prebuilt admin panel that lets you spin up custom fields, column editors, and content types almost instantly-basically, all the stuff WordPress gives you out of the box.
The magic here is precision. Client feedback for Laravel administration is often very positive as I'm able to deliver exactly what they're looking for. Because the UI is built to spec, it ends up being exactly what they need-no more, no less. Clients are involved in shaping it, fostering a sense of ownership. You’re not giving them a CMS; you’re giving them a workflow.
For content teams, Laravel is often a brick wall. WordPress, in contrast, respects the workflow.
Performance: Power vs. Bloat
This is where the philosophies often diverge starkly. Super performance in WordPress can be a bit of a nightmare, I've found. The culprit? Often, it's the sheer volume of plugins.
(WordPress can indeed be tailored to run smooth and fast on almost any web host, but it requires the knowledge and patience to do so - often clients end up with a site delivered that's overflowing with plugins)
The WordPress Plugin Minefield 💣
Novice developers can fall into the trap of thinking you just throw tons of plugins at a site and it’ll have every feature under the sun. And WordPress has a plugin for almost everything – memberships, eCommerce (like WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads for more specific use cases), bookings, directories. In a lot of ways, WordPress is a wrapper for other systems.
But each plugin, especially older or poorly maintained ones, can introduce inefficient database queries or CPU hogging code. If you throw everything and the kitchen sink at your site, and you’re gonna have problems.
Laravel: Built for Efficiency
Laravel approaches performance from a different angle. There’s a sort of wall that developers have to jump over to begin with, in order to actually start developing. This barrier to entry means that part of that learning curve is understanding performance and knowing how to build an app that won’t collapse under its own weight.
While Laravel isn't overly opinionated on structure, it provides tools for speed. Laravel has functionality baked in: lazy loading, query builders, and techniques that help you optimise how your data loads and how you access it. Add Livewire to the mix, and it gives you a snappy front end-clever enough to only pull in the data it needs.
Because of its legacy nature and tangled core, WordPress just isn’t capable of that kind of intelligent behaviour. You're often restricted to a fairly cumbersome but useful theming and templating system. In Laravel, you’re building snappy, sleek Blade templates that do exactly what you want - and they’ll do it efficiently.
Laravel leverages Composer, allowing you to install only bare bones packages; you can strip it of everything you don't need. It's precision tooling. Contrast this with WordPress: if you want WooCommerce for a simple shopping cart (which can be extended with powerful add-ons like WooCommerce Subscriptions or WooCommerce Bookings for more specific needs) you basically get everything it comes with - enterprise-level order management, shipping, attribute management. With Laravel, you have the option to build out of the box only what you need.
Why WordPress Still Wins (Often)
Despite its quirks, WordPress often comes out on top for very practical reasons. That famous five minute setup thing? While I've always seen it as being a little bit cheesy and often not accurate for local setups (managing any sort of local installation of Legacy PHP software can be a nightmare, which is why I quite like Laravel; Composer is very streamlined)
But, with managed hosts like WP Engine or similar, they will take all the headaches out of the process for you, set up WordPress installations super quick and you can be playing and running out the starting gates within 5 minutes, as promised!
The Power of the Ecosystem
As soon as you're in there you can start installing plugins, you can start installing themes, you can browse entire directories of themes and plugins; you can access thousands of blog posts about WordPress, whole communities around it that will recommend the best plugins, the best approaches. So as long as you're dedicated and willing to spend a little bit of time digging into the ecosystem, the help is there.
- Advanced Custom Fields (ACF): It's pretty much core WordPress at this point in time.
- Gravity Forms: My go-to for almost all forms. Gravity Forms and its integrations with things like SendGrid mean it’s a breeze to set up a basic contact form. And let's be honest, contact forms can be an absolutely nightmare, even a simple email/name form; you have to deal with things like cross-site tokens if you are submitting via AJAX, you have to deal with sendability issues, you have to deal with perhaps clients wanting reporting on the backend in terms of storing messages and so on. I once spent an hour debugging CSRF issues on my own Laravel site's contact form before thinking, "I've had enough of this, I'm going for a third party mailing provider." I did, and it's just a website you sign up, embed a form on the site, they handle everything, it's nice.
- Yoast SEO: A comprehensive solution for optimizing your site's search engine presence.
- WP Rocket: An excellent caching plugin to significantly improve site speed and performance.
The Friendly Tech Therapist View:
That "famous five-minute install" for WordPress? We've all been there when it's not quite five minutes, right? (Especially with older PHP versions or complex local environments). Laravel’s `composer create-project` followed by `php artisan serve` often feels more predictable for local development. But for clients on managed WordPress hosting, that one-click promise is often a reality, and a powerful selling point.
I'd say there's still a lot that I miss when working in Laravel, for example the back end of my site here I've got little interface for editing posts it's really really bare bones but it does exactly what I needed to which is not very much. I just need to publish a post, or edit it now and again or change status from published to draft. Not a great deal needed, so not a lot coded!
And now, with AI tools, especially with large context models like Gemini from Google, it's possible to dump huge amounts of code in and basically get the AI to bootstrap your templates and your functionality.
In a way it's like asking the AI to make simple plugins for you. You can think, you know what I want a contact form plugin for Laravel, I want a simple shopping cart for Laravel, and it'll just build it.
And it won't be fully featured and it won't be anything like WooCommerce but if all you need is something straightforward, something simple, then you can have that pretty much straight away. And as long as you are doing it or you have a developer who does, then that can be a fairly quick and easy way of getting that functionality in Laravel.
Headless & Hybrid: When WordPress and Laravel Become Friends
At first glance, Laravel and WordPress might seem like enemies... But in practice? They can be best of friends. This is where headless and hybrid architectures come into play, offering exciting possibilities.
Deep Dive: A Financial Health App Prototype
There was a really nice project I was working on to build a prototype of a financial health application. This involved a front end questionnaire that people could step through; there was a variety of functionality included such as being able to save your progress, being able to easily skip forward and back through sections while saving your inputs as you went.
For this, I built a solid Laravel back-end with its authentication and all of the processing using Laravel's really, really cool API routes functionality. Laravel's API resources are neat; it's basically like doing a front end controller but you have these sort of wrappers that are converters so you're specifying exactly how the API end points will be served.
And depending on the relationships between data that you're requesting, for example you could request a document via the API and you could specify that you also want the user attached to it and it would only return a certain subset of user fields whereas if you're requesting the user directly it would return the whole user model.
So it was a very clever way of building out an API within Laravel; it's very flexible. You can build in security, you can make sure that routes are gated so that only users with certain authentications can access routes, for example, to only view your own records, and it's easily done.
So you can spin up an API quickly that confirms the back end or the front end you have, like Vue.
This was a so-called separate application because the prototype was eventually going to become a mobile phone app as well, so everything would have been using this Laravel API back end.
Similarly, if you're building a Laravel back end for WordPress you would do pretty much the same thing: introduce WordPress's own internal REST request functionality to pull in data from the Laravel API. And you could do clever stuff linking in WordPress user types with Laravel authentication; you could have users synced up between the two databases so it can match email addresses, something like that.
Yeah, it's really fast because you've not got the front end doing any processing, so obviously you're not doing any page rendering and stuff like that. Even with caching, you know if you've got a logged-in user, that user is still going to need the fresh data.
If I had to explain to a client the benefits of linking WordPress and Laravel like this, it would be that you get 20 years of legacy WordPress Management with an extremely modern core.
A Word of Caution: And of course for a brochure site, for a small site, then you just don't go headless; that's ridiculous, there's no need to. With caching, then a lot of functionality, especially with WordPress (we talked earlier about WordPress's performance issues), a lot of that can be mitigated with caching.
You can have caches within WordPress itself or things like Cloudflare, but it is still advisable to optimise WordPress before you rely on caches. Those should be a last resort; your internals within WordPress should be running smoothly regardless because otherwise it could be hiding other issues that you haven't noticed.
WordPress or Laravel? A Quick Decision Guide
Here's a breakdown of when to choose WordPress or Laravel, based on different use cases, to help you make the right call for your project.
1. Content-Heavy Site
Go with WordPress if...
Editorial team needs to start quickly.
- Pro (WP): Familiar, easy content management.
Go with Laravel if...
Need a fully custom CMS/admin.
- Pro (Laravel): Total control over CMS & data.
2. Speed of Delivery Matters
Go with WordPress if...
Need to launch in days, not weeks.
- Pro (WP): Quick setup, fast dev with themes/plugins.
Go with Laravel if...
Okay with upfront time for long-term flexibility.
- Con (Laravel): Longer initial dev time for custom work.
- Pro (Laravel): Very adaptable & scalable.
3. Plugin-Powered Functionality
Go with WordPress if...
A plugin exists for your exact need (e.g., WooCommerce).
- Pro (WP): Many plugins reduce custom dev.
Go with Laravel if...
Logic is too custom for plugins.
- Pro (Laravel): Best for unique needs, avoids plugin mess.
4. User Experience (Admin/Editorial)
Go with WordPress if...
Users know WP admin, and it's important.
- Pro (WP): Low learning curve for WP-familiar users.
Go with Laravel if...
Want full control over user/admin UX.
- Pro (Laravel): Tailored admin optimizes workflows.
5. API-Driven / Headless
Go with WordPress if...
Using with existing Laravel API, or WP as headless CMS.
- Pro (WP): Leverage WP content management with Laravel backend/frontend.
Go with Laravel if...
Building API & logic from scratch.
- Pro (Laravel): Robust for powerful, scalable APIs.
6. Security & Maintainability
Go with WordPress if...
On managed hosting with careful plugin use.
- Pro (WP): Good security with quality hosting & good plugins.
- Con (WP): Security risk with bad plugins; needs care.
Go with Laravel if...
Need detailed access control, auth, tests.
- Pro (Laravel): Great tools for security, testing, robust apps.
7. Cost / Budget
Go with WordPress if...
Need a site fast, low dev overhead for standard features.
- Pro (WP): Cost-effective for simpler sites (themes/plugins).
Go with Laravel if...
Budget & dev support for evolving a custom system.
- Pro (Laravel): Custom dev: pricier upfront, cost-effective long-term for complex projects.
