We run our property company's CRM and over 300 websites from one server costing about £50 a month. The obvious question is why we don't just use WordPress like everyone else.
It's a fair question. WordPress runs about 40% of the websites in the world, and for a lot of people it's the right choice. I'm not saying this from the outside, either. I've built WordPress sites with my daughter, and it was really hard to do. Move one thing on a page and sometimes the whole layout would mess up. It used massive server resources too. As an experience, it was terrible. These days I build on Laravel instead, and this is why.
What we're comparing
WordPress is a content management system. You install it, pick a theme and add plugins: small packages of code written by other people that add features. Want a contact form, a shop or an SEO tool? There's a plugin for each. That's why it's so popular. You don't need to be a developer to get a site live. And if you were a developer, you probably wouldn't use WordPress.
Laravel is a PHP framework. It's a foundation you build on, not a finished product. There's no plugin shop. You build exactly what the site needs and nothing else. It asks more of you at the start and gives you much more back.
The plugin problem
Every plugin is someone else's code running on your server, with its own author, its own updates and its own security holes. A site with thirty plugins depends on thirty different people keeping their code safe. Most WordPress security holes are found in plugins rather than in WordPress itself, and an out of date plugin is one of the commonest ways in.
I've seen it happen. A local club I know had their WordPress site broken into, and the way in was a plugin, not WordPress. I built them a custom site after that. For some reason they have gone back to WordPress, which defies logic, but that's their decision.
Then there are updates. You're told to keep everything up to date, which is right, but one plugin update can break another plugin or the theme. So the update you did to make the site safer takes it offline. And plugins get abandoned. The author moves on, and you're left running code that will never be fixed.
To be fair to WordPress, Laravel uses other people's code too. It's built from open source packages, and so are our sites. The difference is that there are fewer of them, I choose each one, they're widely used and maintained, and there's no plugin admin area open to the internet. Nothing gets added to our sites because someone clicked "install". Updates happen when I decide, and I test them first.
Speed
This is where the difference is easiest to see, because you can measure it.
Our home page starts arriving in about 0.1 seconds and is fully loaded in a further 0.1 seconds. The whole page is 43KB and loads one JavaScript file, our privacy friendly analytics. That isn't an expensive server. It's how the site is built.
A WordPress site built with a page builder often takes two or three seconds and pulls in well over a hundred separate files. Put both through a tool like Pingdom and you'll often see a Grade C for the WordPress site against a Grade A for a lean framework site. The reason is that the page builder loads styles and scripts for every feature the theme and plugins offer, whether the page uses them or not. A framework only sends what the page in front of you needs.
That matters. Visitors leave slow sites before they read anything, and Google takes speed into account.
Building exactly what you need
This is the one that matters most to me.
With WordPress, customising is easy as long as a theme or plugin already does what you want. Beyond that you need custom code written inside WordPress. A good developer can do that, but by then you've lost the simplicity that made WordPress attractive in the first place, and you're often working around the theme and plugins rather than with them.
In Laravel, custom is the starting point. Our CRM, which replaced FileMaker, isn't a plugin. Nor is the part that reads safety certificates with AI and records when they expire. Nor is the phonebook it builds for our Yealink desk phones. And all 300 websites run from one set of code. It's all just code, written to do what the business needs.
With a framework, the software fits the business. With WordPress, sooner or later you either change how the business works to suit the software, or pay to make the software fit.
Why custom code is cheaper than it was
The usual answer to all this is that Laravel needs a developer, and that's true. I've been programming for about 45 years, starting with a system to detect burst pins in a fast breeder reactor, and I'm now studying for a PhD in agentic AI. So I can code, and I understand how systems fit together. What has changed is how much one person can do. I build most of it with Claude Code, an AI coding tool, and it makes my life easy. It does the junior work and I make the decisions. A few years ago, building your own system meant hiring a team. Now one person who knows what they want can build a lot.
I won't pretend the setup is easy. Getting the Laravel server, Claude Code and the web server working together, so that every site is served automatically over SSL, with the web server getting and renewing the security certificates for all 300 sites on its own, is hard. But once it's done, it runs every day. Over the last month the sites have been up 99.997% of the time, with about 80 seconds of downtime in all.
The cost nobody adds up
WordPress is free, but running it often isn't. Premium plugins have yearly licences, a heavy site usually needs better hosting to stay quick, and keeping everything updated takes time.
We have no plugin licences, and one server runs everything. Because every site shares the same code, a fix made once reaches all 300.
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The catch
Owning your code means owning the problems. Security, updates and backups are your job, and nobody else is watching. We found that out when a routine system update stopped our backups and nothing told us. If nobody in your business can look after code and a server, that matters more than any of the advantages above.
When I'd use WordPress
If you have no developer, need a blog or a brochure site live tomorrow, and won't do much more with it, WordPress is a sensible choice.
It changes when you want more: real speed, fewer security worries, or anything built around how your business works. That's when the plugins start holding you back and a framework starts paying for itself.
My view
I'd rather know every piece of code on my server and why it's there, and be able to build whatever the business needs without waiting for a plugin to do it. That's what Laravel gives me, and it's why our sites are fast, stable and do things a pile of plugins couldn't.
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