It is very important to make a wise decision while choosing which technology to trust for building your website. Choose a weak framework and you will jeopardize its performance and security. Pick an old dying horse and you may run the risk of not being able to upgrade your website to reach the new level.
And then comes Laravel. It is a powerful PHP framework strong enough to give you high performance and tight security and active enough to bring constant updates. If anything, Laravel is getting stronger and more popular with each passing day.
You may be wondering what makes Laravel such a standout framework amid the rising number of other options. The USP of Laravel is that it rejuvenates itself regularly to get even better.
Time changes so fast and with it, the needs also change. Laravel makes sure that it runs along with the time and continues to fulfill the current need of the hour. This makes Laravel a popular option among businesses to trust with their website development.
Let’s take a look at Laravel’s evolution to see how big it has gone
Laravel has a history of continuous betterment of itself. Since its inception in 2011, Laravel has come up with 9 new versions, with the latest one being released on 8th Feb 2022.
But there is no better proof than others using it. Thus…
Laravel has become a popular choice for developing websites for businesses across various industries and countries. Take a look at these figures to see for yourself the trust Laravel enjoys.
Laravel offers you a lot of positives which makes it an obvious choice over others. There is a reason why Laravel is one of the most popular frameworks in the world. In fact, I am going to give you 15 reasons to choose Laravel for web development.
Wouldn’t it feel great if you find help whenever you are stuck? Laravel boasts a huge population of patrons who are ready to help you at every step. And it wouldn’t be wrong to say that whatever the glitch you may face, a solution already exists in the Laravel community.
Security is a serious issue at this time. A website weakly guarded is like a broken locker of money ready to be looted by thieves. Hackers are relentlessly hunting for such websites to fulfill their malicious intents. But Laravel makes your website ever-ready with its in-built security features.
Laravel framework is a collection of highly optimized pieces of code for anything you will ever need for your business website. Its easy-to-use code ensures fast development of your website and thus, brings its cost down for you.
You will be blessed with error handling features if you pick the Laravel framework for your web development project. One of the main culprits of such situations is forms where errors are bound to occur. But you can prompt users with an alert message to tackle it.
Constantly reaching out to your potential clients is a great way to connect with them and promote new offers. Laravel’s API and drivers for mail service integration enable you to send e-mails and notifications to your users smoothly.
High performance from websites has become a standard to measure their quality. In fact, search engines also prefer faster websites over their slower counterparts. Fortunately, Laravel has you covered with its tools to provide your website visitors with a superfast experience.
Multilingual websites are websites with multiple language options. This way you can cater to a larger audience to increase your reach and boost your sales. Laravel understands its importance and thus, has laid the path for you to have the same.
Pro tip - One of the features that has been unique in Laravel is a feature called auto-complete. This isn’t found in any other frameworks.
Testing is crucial as it lets you find bugs and defects in any functionality that you may have overlooked. It boosts user experience and ensures that everything works the way it was intended to. Laravel makes testing easy for developers and testers with its in-built features.
Laravel is ideal for building large projects which makes it the first choice for website, web app and mobile app development. Many small companies also prefer Laravel because it is a highly scalable framework that assures them to carry out future development and enhancements further when the need arises.
Out of the many stand-out features Laravel has, one such is called command scheduler. It allows developers to schedule commands within the framework which makes it easier to develop your project.
Data is the new gold in the modern world. Thus, it is essential to protect it with the same deliberation. But don’t worry because Laravel has already laid the path for you. Its data migration feature reduces the risk of data theft and provides access to only the permitted members. Database migration also eases the sharing of database schema and reduces the effort of creating tables manually. This feature is particularly useful for a database development company that works with large volumes of data and needs to ensure its integrity and security. By leveraging Laravel's database migration feature, companies can ensure that their data is well-organized, easily accessible, and secure from unauthorized access.
Laravel is an open-source ecosystem which makes it absolutely free to use. It has pre-built libraries of code for all the features and sections you will ever require for your website. This greatly reduces your Laravel development cost and time to complete your project.
The ability to deploy your website with new features quickly is essential to have an edge in this competitive market. Laravel’s in-built libraries are easy to embed in your website, reducing your time to launch your website or upgrades to the market.
What’s worse than getting huge traffic to your website only to see it crashing? Modern-day websites need to stand their ground even when the traffic spikes. Or else, you will lose your credibility in bulk. But Laravel has taken care that this won’t happen with your website.
As I said earlier, what you expect to have on your website, most probably already exists in the huge libraries of Laravel. Thanks to Laravel’s huge community, it has anticipated the need for laravel website development. What’s even better is that these libraries also continue to expand.
Laravel is full of features that give you a smooth ride developing your website and web app. Here I have mentioned some of its best features that give Laravel the popularity it deserves.
Templates are great as they make development easy and quick while giving you an option to personalize your website. Laravel has a lot of in-built templates for you to choose from. They are lightweight and easy to integrate.
MVC stands for Model View Controller. It boosts up the process of the development of your website as it separates the backend development from the frontend development. Many popular frameworks along with Laravel support MVC architecture.
Laravel has OOL (Object-Oriented Libraries) and ORM (Object Relationship Mapping) libraries. OOL helps you to monitor user activity, reset the password, encrypt mechanisms, and protect from CSRF. Whereas ORM offers you high-speed data transfer.
Having strong security for your website is not an option anymore. But Laravel has got you covered. Laravel has many security features that fail the most popular ways of cyber attacks and prevent your precious data.
Laravel makes it super easy for developers to test and check whether the code is performing as intended. It also allows you to play with the code without harming the original one so you can try out different ways to do the stuff.
You may have to migrate your data from one database to another for various reasons. But it can be tricky as you may lose some of your data while doing so. Thus, Laravel has already laid out a smooth process to enable you to migrate your data.
Laravel has a command line tool called Artisan that helps you with its pre-built commands. This can truly save your time on performing repetitive tasks during the development and also lower the cost of developing your website or web app.
Security of your data is important because you will also lose the invaluable trust of your audience if it gets mishandled. So, with Laravel, you can authorize access to the data as per the roles of the people. This ensures that no one gets to see the data more than he is needed to.
Laravel has many pre-built libraries of code that you won’t find in any other PHP frameworks. These libraries provide you with code to implement various features on your website. For example - the authentication library has in its features such as CSRF protection, Bcrypt hashing, password reset, etc.
You must administer the tasks. Thus, Laravel helps you to set up and plan tasks such as clearing databases, sending emails, etc. A new entry is added to the server whenever you use the command scheduler which makes it easy for you to stay on track of it.
Package installation used to be tricky as there were a lot of compatibility issues. But now, with the latest update of Laravel, it detects automatically the units you may want to use. And when the installation is essential, it removes the initial use of aliases.
It is hard to beat the community support you enjoy with Laravel. Laravel community of developers is with you at each step guiding you to overcome your pressing concerns with your website and web app. Laravel has an easy-to-use documentation as well.
Cashier provides an interface to Stripe’s subscription billing services that is smooth and easy to navigate. It has all the boilerplate subscription billing codes so you won’t have to reinvent the wheel. On top of that, Cashier offers you many features such as coupons, invoice PDFs, etc.
Laravel Echo makes it easy for you to subscribe to channels and listen to events broadcast. Event broadcasting is done by a server-side broadcasting driver that projects Laravel events so that a JavaScript Library called Laravel Echo can receive them within the browser client.
Laravel Envoyer is a zero downtime deployment service for PHP and Laravel projects. In other words, it helps you run your deployments seamlessly once you connect it to your server so the visitors to your web application never experience downtime.
Laravel Forge is server management and application deployment service. In simpler words, Forge alleviates the pain of deploying servers while launching your website. It isn’t just limited to Laravel. You can use Forge even if your website is built with Symfony, Statamic, or WordPress.
Laravel Vapor is an AWS-powered serverless deployment platform for Laravel. It helps you manage your entire application infrastructure from the powerful platform it has built for your website and web application. It is extremely simple to use and grows as your website or web app grows.
Laravel Homestead is Laravel’s official pre-packaged vagrant box. Vagrant boxes give you a simple way to manage virtual machines. Laravel Homestead provides you with a great development environment that won’t even require you to install PHP, a web server, or any other software on your local machine.
Laravel Horizon gives you an elegant dashboard and code-driven configuration for the queue. With it, you can easily monitor key metrics such as runtime, task failures, and throughput of your queue system. All your queue configurations will be stored in a single configuration file.
Want to be a more productive Laravel developer? Then Nova is something you should definitely try. Nova is an elegantly-designed administrative panel for Laravel. It is uniquely created keeping in mind the needs of Laravel developers. Nova is smooth, simple, and customizable as per your requirements.
Laracasts creator, Jeffery Way, developed the Laravel Mix package. It makes it super-smooth to compile and minify JavaScript and CSS files. This, in turn, greatly increases the speed of a website or web app. It is a great alternative to webpack and asset compilation which may be confusing and overwhelming to you.
If you are looking for a great companion for the local Laravel development environment, then look no further than Laravel Telescope. It provides you with many powerful insights into the incoming requests in your application, log entries, database-related queries, scheduled tasks, cache operations, and much more.
The combination of Laravel and VueJS development is a killer one when it comes to web development. VueJS is a great frontend Javascript framework that can help you develop user interfaces and single-page applications. And on the other hand, Laravel speeds up the development process with its pre-built libraries which contain code for almost every feature you will ever need for your website or web app.
Similar to the previous combo, Laravel and Angular js development also complement each other well to develop a website and web app of any scale. Many developers and companies prefer these two over others because of the combined benefits they provide such as: -
Fast development to save time and cost
Highly responsive website to give users the best experience
Powerful website for high-speed performance
ReactJS is an open-source frontend JavaScript library design for react js application development , providing UI components to build user interfaces effortlessly. In other words, React JS makes it absolutely effortless to develop interactive UIs. It has everything to give your website a high-quality look. Its benefits include - a rich UI, custom components, fast rendering, better code stability, and much more with reac. But its power is further enhanced when Laravel is attached to it.
Svelte is amongst the best client-side JavaScript frameworks that let you develop ultra-fast web applications with minimal load and complexity. Thus, the combination of Laravel and Svelte is very popular to work with. Their combined power enables you to develop websites and web apps of the modern standard.
Inertia.js is one of the best ways to build single-page apps without ever having to build an API. It makes it fast to build single-page ReactJS, VueJS, and Svelte apps using the traditional server-side routing and controllers. So, if you have a small-scale project which demands top-notch quality, Laravel and Inertia.js is something you should consider.
Working with ReactJS and VueJS can get a bit complicated when developing a high-scale website or web app. Thus, Livewire is a perfect alternative to them as it is a full-stack framework for Laravel that simplifies building dynamic interfaces. Since one of its sponsors is Laravel, you will also enjoy all the benefits of Laravel.
The Laravel authentication system is a powerful way to tackle malicious attempts of hackers to take down your website. It provides you with a layer of security to authenticate users. Laravel uses the tags “Provider” and “Guard” for authentication. Guards validate users whereas the provider retrieves the user from the database.
CSRF or Cross-Site Request Forgery ensures that any external party cannot make fake requests to breach the website's security. Laravel creates a valid token for every request generated. And then it matches that token with the one saved in the user’s session. If both the token matches, only then it would allow any further action, or else the request would be rejected.
XSS stands for Cross Site Scripting. Here hackers enter your website via the form fields. Whenever someone fills up the manipulated form, the malicious script will be executed to perform the tasks intended by the hacker within your website. Thankfully, Laravel knows this and thus, offers a simple solution to handle this.
SQL is a code injection technique that can destroy your whole database. How? It happens when you ask for input from the user such as his name and instead he gives you an SQL query that you may get run within your system. It is one of the most common ways of hacking these days. Laravel knows this and thus, its Eloquent ORM uses PDO binding to protect your website from SQL injections.
Poorly written code creates loopholes that can be an entry point for hackers to sneak into your website. But Laravel ensures that no raw HTML is provided to the user. However, due to some circumstances, if you do have to yield it to the user, HTML Purifier cleans it up and fills the missing elements first.
Laravel has many security packages to improve the strength of your website and web application. With cybercrime on the rise, Laravel continues to evolve its security packages to prep you up to tackle them. Each of these packages is designed to handle a particular set of threats and situations. On top of that, they are also easy to implement.
Laravel has a vast community that ensures its modernization. It is regularly updated to make it even better than its past version. Thus, you will often see new Laravel trends popping up. So let me introduce you to the most popular Laravel trends of 2023.
First of all, I am not talking about PHP - the language but Personal Home Page. The need for PHP outsourcing is increasing day by day. Thus, Laravel is making sure to help developers minimize their expenses on it. Laravel is equally effective in building small-scale to high-profile websites.
Laravel offers free in-built libraries to help you develop your website easily. In fact, it is the only single application development framework that has a free library. Amongst Laravel’s most comprehensive libraries is its authentication library. However, it has plenty of others that serve various other purposes.
PHP web development with IoT is one of the hottest technology for the past few years. It integrates all the electronic devices around us and communicates with themselves for coordination and better effectiveness. Laravel framework complemented with IoT make a web app and website performance better. It also improves tracking and automation.
Ever looking to learn Laravel and its tools and tricks? Or have any questions related to Laravel? Then Laracasts is the best place to go. It is like a community that helps millions of Laravel lovers all over the world with easy-to-follow videos and docs. Developers come here to get their issues solved or help others.
AI chatbots have been growing in numbers exponentially. Almost every business website we see today has a chatbot attached to it to keep visitors engaged and collect their information. But with AI integration its powers will be multiple folds. Thus, AI chatbots have been a quickly growing trend and Laravel has been prepared for this as well.
Cloud storage is where companies are shifting their database and hosting because it has many lucrative features, making it a much more reliable option than its traditional counterparts. Laravel framework is cloud-friendly, offering you plugins and packages to integrate with your website and web application. It also has APIs to smoothen the switching between various cloud services.
Do you know search engines like Google show different results for mobile and PC? With the increasing usage of the internet through smartphones, Google wants to give mobile-friendly search results to users. Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP optimizes the web pages of your website to give you an edge in mobile rankings over other pages.
The trend of buying things online has only grown since the inception of the internet, and e-commerce giants like Amazon have capitalized on this trend. Today, many small and large e-commerce stores have also entered the marketplace of the internet. With Laravel ecommerce development, entrepreneurs can start their own online stores loaded with the latest features to provide customers with a seamless shopping experience. One example of a Laravel-based e-commerce platform is Laravel Bagisto development, which offers a wide range of features such as product management, inventory tracking, and customer management. By using Laravel Bagisto, businesses can quickly create a robust e-commerce platform that meets the needs of their customers while leveraging the many benefits of the Laravel framework.
Blockchain technology has been another buzz in the town. It is known for its decentralized nature, providing security and transparency. In fact, you may recall that cryptocurrencies also use blockchain to secure their whole system and remove any kind of governing entity. Laravel community uses this technology to enable websites to accept payment with cryptocurrencies.
Once a business grows, the demand for its websites also grows. Thus, the tech stack of the website of any company needs to be highly scalable. If that isn’t so, they may need to spend a fortune to redevelop the website with a different language. But that isn’t the case with Laravel. Laravel is highly scalable and allows faster development with its libraries.
Testing is a very crucial part of web development. It exposes the flaws that can lead to poor user experience or hacked software. Every mobile app you see today brings updates in regular intervals for this same purpose. Laravel provides you with an extensive testing environment to test stuff such as units, features, and integration.
You are building an application so more and more people use it. However, with growth comes more responsibilities on your shoulder to handle the user base concurrently. Laravel provides great scalability, helping you to develop from a small application to a highly sophisticated one as per your needs. Laravel has features such as caching, queueing, cloud integration, etc. to make your application sustain high demand.
Laravel has a huge community of developers who love to build various projects with it. Most likely, a project similar to what you are trying to develop has already been in existence. Thus, you can create your project quickly by updating the existing projects as per your unique requirements.
Laravel perfectly fits into the notion of “What you see is what you get.” In the other words, Laravel is an open-source framework where nothing is hidden from you because it relies on contributions from other developers. This transparency is great for your web application as you can access the whole ecosystem of Laravel.
Laravel has a lot of libraries and packages from which you can pick the code for features you would like to have on your web application. And many of these libraries are also shared with another PHP framework called Symfony. Laravel development practices make it easy to develop your application with clean and minimal code.
Laravel is future-ready as its huge community makes it better and better with each update, loaded with the modern features that a website and web app require. Thus, the future of Laravel looks bright, both for developers and its users.
As we have seen above in Laravel trends, it is adapting to the changes in the world. Technologies such as Blockchain, AI chatbots, and the Internet of Things (IoT) have already come into play in the field of Laravel. Thus, if you are moving ahead with Laravel as your web development partner, you are with the right companion.
Laravel brings its update every six months to a year. The latest version of Laravel is Laravel 9 which was released on 8th February 2022. This was a major update in Laravel which came after 1.5 years. Its next update is scheduled to release in Feb 2023.
Here are some reasons why Laravel is better than others: -
Laravel has great security features.
It is more than a framework. It is a whole ecosystem to give you everything you need to develop your website and web app with its premise.
It has a huge community to support you all the way.
You can expect high performance from websites developed with Laravel.
Over 1.5 million businesses use Laravel for their website.
Yes. Laravel provides a great platform for the quick development of an MVP. On top of that, Laravel libraries possess well-written code that makes your MVP fast and secure.
If you would like to know more about MVP and its development, I highly recommend you to read our MVP blog series.
I have shown you some great Laravel combinations in this blog article. However, if I had to pick one over the others, I will go with Laravel and Vue.js.
Yes, Laravel is very secure. It is prepared to deal with the issue of increasing cybercrime. Thus, it has methods in place to nullify the most common way hackers try to enter your system, making it one of the most secure frameworks currently.
Whoa! I know this was a huge one but I wanted to cover every aspect of Laravel as to why it is the best framework out there for the development of your website and web app. As you know by now, Laravel has got your back from all sides. Whether it is scalability, security, quickness, or the latest tech features, Laravel is your best bet to go.
And for Laravel development, we are the best company to partner with. Why? Because we have been into it since its inception in 2011. Thus, we have seen its every nook and cranny and continue to dedicate ourselves to it.
I love to make a difference. Thus, I started Acquaint Softtech with the vision of making developers easily accessible and affordable to all. Me and my beloved team have been fulfilling this vision for over 15 years now and will continue to get even bigger and better.
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