Choose WordPress when what you need is a website or online store: content your editors can update themselves, and marketing and e-commerce that follow familiar patterns. Choose a custom application in Laravel when you need a system that supports your own processes – a customer portal, a booking flow, an internal tool or integrations where the logic is unique to you. Many businesses benefit from both, and they work well together.
Two different kinds of tool
WordPress is a ready-made content management system (CMS). Most of what a website needs is there from the start or available as a plugin: pages, news, forms, SEO tools and, with WooCommerce, e-commerce. You build by choosing, adapting and extending.
Laravel is a framework, a toolkit for developing your own software in the PHP programming language. There is no ready-made admin panel or page structure. Everything is built around your needs, which gives great freedom but means every feature has to be developed.
Choose WordPress when
- Your main need is content: service pages, news, guides and landing pages.
- Your marketing team or other editors should be able to work on their own without hiring developers.
- You sell online and your needs look like everyone else's: products, cart, card or Swish payments (Swish is the dominant Swedish mobile payment app), shipping and a link to your accounting.
- You want to get started quickly at a lower upfront cost.
- You want to be able to switch suppliers without being tied to whoever built the site.
Choose Laravel when
- You have processes that do not exist as off-the-shelf plugins: quote workflows, bookings with your own rules, calculations or case management.
- Customers or partners need to log in and see their own information, such as orders, contracts, documents or status.
- You need an internal system to replace spreadsheets and manual work.
- Several systems need to talk to each other – ERP, inventory, CRM – and the logic in between is your own.
- The system is a product in itself, for example a service you sell to your customers.
The grey zone: when WordPress has been stretched too far
WordPress can be made to do a lot with plugins and custom code, and sometimes that is the right path. Signs you have gone past the limit: the site is held together by many interdependent plugins, every update feels risky, there are manual steps such as exporting and importing files, or a large share of the functionality lives in a custom plugin that is really an application. At that point it often costs more to keep patching than to move the logic into its own application.
The reverse is also true. Building an ordinary business website as a custom Laravel application means paying to develop things WordPress already has.
Cost and time
A simpler WordPress website starts at around SEK 25,000 and often takes 2–4 weeks. An online store with integrations takes roughly 4–8 weeks. Fixed project prices are the norm.
A Laravel application has a higher upfront cost because everything is built from scratch, and larger web applications often take 2–6 months. The price depends entirely on what the system needs to do, so a meaningful estimate requires the needs to be described. In return, you get a system that does what you need, with no per-user licence fees and no features you do not use. A good way to keep the risk down is to start with a clearly scoped first version and build on it once it is in use.
Long-term maintenance
Both need ongoing care, but in different ways.
- WordPress consists of the core, a theme and often many plugins from different vendors. Updates are frequent and need testing, and security monitoring matters a great deal because third-party code is a common way in for attackers. Maintenance plans from Swedish agencies that publish their prices range from roughly SEK 400 to 5,000 per month.
- Laravel has fewer external dependencies and therefore fewer surprises. The framework gets a new major version about once a year and the PHP version needs to stay current, so upgrades need planning. Every new feature or change requires a developer, and documentation and automated tests determine how easily someone else can take over.
Combinations that work well
- WordPress for the website, Laravel for the customer portal. The marketing team runs the website themselves, and customers log in to a separate portal built around your processes.
- WooCommerce with a custom application behind it. The store handles sales, while a Laravel application handles order flow, inventory or connections to systems such as Fortnox, a widely used Swedish accounting platform.
- WordPress as a content source for an application. Editors write in WordPress and the content is pulled in wherever it is needed.
The systems are connected through APIs rather than by sharing a database. That way each one can be updated or replaced without breaking the other.
Questions to ask before you decide
- Are there ready-made solutions that cover most of the need?
- Who will update the content, and how often?
- Which other systems need to be connected, and who owns the logic between them?
- What is the budget for ongoing maintenance, not just for the build?
- What will the need look like in three years?
Our recommendation
Start with WordPress when the job is content and e-commerce. It is faster, cheaper and easier for your editors. Choose Laravel when you are building something unique to your business that should not have to bend to what a plugin can do. We work with both and are happy to suggest a split that holds up over time. Read more about our WordPress development and Laravel development.