I vividly remember the first time I used WordPress. It was 2005, and I’d just started a personal blog to share occasional odd ideas and keep family updated when I went travelling.
Back then, Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist, and while social networks like MySpace were around, blogging felt like the simplest and most flexible way to publish content openly online in a way where I could control my data.
I evaluated various blogging tools to run on my cheap hosting package but quickly hit roadblocks. Most required complex server configurations or technical skills that, although I had them, I simply didn’t want to spend time implementing. Or worse, having to spend more on hosting.
Finally, I tried WordPress. And it just worked. Everything I needed to share words, pictures, and the occasional bit of data was already built-in and straightforward.
Fast-forward nearly two decades, and that simple blog still runs on WordPress – continuously since 2005. It’s a testament to WordPress’s exceptional longevity and adaptability. It’s one of the few pieces of software I’ve consistently used over such a long period.
WordPress’s open-source community deserves enormous credit for keeping it relevant, powerful, and user-friendly.
Strengths and challenges
But over the years, particularly as we began building more advanced websites and applications, I noticed a growing challenge.
While WordPress was superb for straightforward content publishing, customising it to create unique functionality was surprisingly difficult and often expensive.
Coming from Rapid Application Development (RAD) backgrounds – like Borland Delphi and Visual Basic—I was used to frameworks that allowed rapid iteration and easy customisation.
In contrast, WordPress felt cumbersome whenever we needed to extend it beyond standard plugins but came with some big advantages.
The WordPress Advantage
We explored other web development frameworks to address this productivity gap. Early frameworks like Django were interesting but complex to scale, and CakePHP never fully clicked for our team.
Instead, we doubled down on WordPress, becoming experts at making it do remarkable things and developed our own WordPress framework that we now call Standfirst Publish.
By 2009, our work was powering high-profile sites for clients such as The Telegraph, Metro International, and Informa. Some of those early sites are still running and we still provide a solution on this platform for The Telegraph.
WordPress allowed us to deliver quickly using plugins, themes, and extensions developed by a vast community. Because plugin costs were spread across thousands of customers, it was incredibly economical to build feature-rich websites quickly.
Yet, despite these strengths, custom development tasks continued to feel slow and costly. Integrating bespoke functionality, particularly when dealing with many plugins, became increasingly complex. Code is expensive, and efficiency matters deeply to our customers.
Why Laravel?
Enter Laravel. Laravel is an MVC-based framework designed explicitly for high productivity in custom web application development.
We’ve found that custom functionality that might take days or weeks in WordPress often takes a fraction of the time in Laravel.
Additionally, Laravel’s modern, streamlined architecture makes it inherently faster and easier to maintain. Especially for sites needing complex integrations, custom workflows, or dynamic features.
Performance matters
To illustrate performance differences: our fastest WordPress sites rely on extensive caching and optimisation strategies.
With these techniques, we achieve impressive load times (often under 200ms). However, without careful optimisations, WordPress page rendering can take up to a second, which can feel slow to end-users.
By contrast, Laravel-built applications typically achieve response times of just 100-300ms, even without complex optimisation layers.
Cost and complexity
Cost considerations also highlight the differences. WordPress remains unbeatable for simple websites, benefiting from a massive ecosystem of ready-to-go plugins and themes.
However, as complexity grows, Laravel quickly becomes more cost-effective, reducing long-term maintenance and providing greater stability for bespoke applications.
The best of both worlds
Recognising these complementary strengths led us to a compelling hybrid solution: bridging Laravel with WordPress. This approach allows us to harness Laravel’s efficiency and performance for custom functionality, while leveraging WordPress’s ease of use and publishing power for content management.
Although maintaining two platforms isn’t suitable for every project, this blended approach offers tremendous flexibility and performance for clients requiring both simplicity and sophisticated functionality.
Ultimately, WordPress and Laravel each shine in their own ways.
WordPress remains fantastic for accessible, content-rich websites, while Laravel excels when you need rapid, cost-effective, and stable custom development.
By understanding these strengths, we can help our clients choose exactly the right tool – or even a strategic combination of both – to meet their goals efficiently and effectively.
Find out more about our work with Laravel here.
