WordPress vs PHPframework – which one should you choose to build your new website? As much as we would like to give you a single, straightforward, no-nonsense answer, we really can’t!

Why?

Because whether it’s WordPress CMS or custom PHP frameworks, each of them has several pros and cons. As a result, the ideal choice depends on what kind of website you are planning to build and what kind of features you want in it.

Do you want a simple yet beautiful blogging website that will help your web pages rank in Google SERPs with ease? Choose the WordPress CMS to build your site. Do you want to develop a flexible business website with a variety of custom features, personalized landing pages, and robust security? Then, go with the PHP frameworks.

Are things getting quite complicated? Don’t worry – we are here to help. In this article, we will show you whether WordPress CMS or a custom PHP framework is a better choice for developing your next website.

But before we get into it, let’s see what the WordPress CMS and PHP frameworks actually are.

What is WordPress CMS?

In the world of CMSs, WordPress is one of the most well-known options available at no cost to the user. It allows you to create web content, write blogs, and design your website using a user-friendly and almost completely visual interface.

Apart from the core features of a CMS, you can also improve or extend its functionality using other methods relevant to the CMS. For WordPress, the extension of functionality can be done using various plugins and themes.

And most of them are actually free to download and set up. However, WordPress also has many direct or third-party plugins and themes that offer better features, instant support, and routine updates.

WordPress was created with a single goal – to allow people to create practical websites by providing multiple features out of the box.

In simple words, no matter how much technical or coding knowledge you have, with WordPress, building a beautiful and functional website should be within your grasp.

These days, many people are using the WordPress CMS to build different kinds of websites and blogs. In fact, a W3Techs study says that 43.2% of all websites on the internet are built using WordPress as of 2022. That’s two out of every five websites on the internet today.

Not only that – the same study mentioned that 65.2% of all CMS-based websites are built using WordPress. This makes it the most popular CMS available in the market today.

What’s more, many Fortune 500 companies around the globe are using WordPress CMS to build and run their business websites. Large companies favour WordPress because of its diverse set of plugins, dedicated community, multiple hosting choices, and tons of options for customizations.

What is a Custom PHP Framework?

You need a good understanding of coding and practical knowledge and experience with the PHP coding language to understand how the custom PHP framework works. PHP is a general-purpose coding language that is geared toward developing websites, applications, and other web tools.

In fact, PHP is also the main language that is used to build the WordPress CMS. So, if you are looking to develop a website, PHP is one of the most suitable coding languages.

A PHP framework is a kind of template that contain various PHP code libraries that significantly reduces the amount of code you need to write to develop a custom website. The framework has multiple powerful functions and built-in libraries to help coders complete their projects faster. This way, you don’t have to start coding from scratch to build a website or web application.

Popular PHP Frameworks

While there are multiple custom PHP frameworks available today, some frameworks work better than others when it comes to building specific kinds of websites.

Here’s a list of some of the most notable PHP frameworks:

  • Laravel: One of the best PHP frameworks to build web applications with ease.
  • Symfony: This is one of the most popular PHP frameworks that offer a variety of different components. It also has a large and active community, where you can clear most of your doubts and get good tips regarding PHP coding.
  • CodeIgniter: This is a highly flexible and minimalist framework that puts a lot of emphasis on creating websites with high quality and performance.
  • Cake PHP: One of the most user-friendly PHP frameworks available right now. This framework can help you build your own custom CMS.

In simple words, a PHP framework is a kind of foundation or template that can help you build a website. Of course, it would require a lot of work and programming on your end. You need to have solid coding skills, as well as a good budget, if you want a website with many advanced features.

WordPress vs PHP Framework: Differences

WordPress vs PHP – which one is the best to build a website? While we really hate the say it, the truth is that it depends on your requirements. In this section, we will compare these two platforms in terms of multiple aspects to figure out which one suits you the best.

Security

Security, without a doubt, is one of the biggest concerns of any website or web application owner. If you fail to make your website secure enough, your sensitive data can fall into any cybercriminal’s hands.

As a result, failing to secure your website can cause you many legal and financial troubles.

And if you’re planning to build a website for your business, making a choice between WordPress and PHP frameworks becomes less of a matter of preference. After all, the option that can provide the most security features is often the best choice.

The WordPress CMS is inherently more secure and you can add many layers of security features to it using plugins, themes, and many other features. In other words, it doesn’t require too much work on your part to make a WordPress site absolutely secure. However, you’re still limited to what WordPress and other plugins have to offer.

On the other hand, the custom PHP framework allows you to add whatever security feature you want. Of course, that’s true as long as you are skilled enough to create the security features yourself.

Flexibility and Customization

Flexibility isn’t always one of the people’s main considerations when building a website, as long as they know exactly what they want. For example, a niche-specific blog with a few fixed features.

However, if you are building a website that provides many customs services, such as an e-Commerce website, you might need many custom solutions that work perfectly with each other.

A CMS like WordPress offers a lot of features and customization options that perfectly integrate with your website. But if you have very specific requirements for a website’s functionality and design, the PHP frameworks might be better than WordPress.

Just like the security aspect, the PHP frameworks offer a lot of flexibility and customization choices while building a website. Once again, you should choose the PHP framework only if you have enough coding skills or the budget to hire a professional developer.

Upgrades

The internet is evolving with every passing day. And so are the technologies regarding web development and their standards. Continuous updates and bug fixes allow website owners to keep their sites up-to-date and make their visitors feel secure.

A CMS like WordPress and its plugins often receive constant updates every once in a while. These updates fix bugs, implement user feedback, add new features, and improve your site security.

WordPress is very active and releases minor and major upgrades at regular intervals to keep your website secure and introduce new helpful features.

Even though the custom PHP frameworks release new upgrades, they are not as frequent as the WordPress CMS. What’s more, the main responsibility of maintaining the site security and feature improvement is to the site developer’s hands who understand PHP.

While it doesn’t make websites built using the PHP framework any less stable, it does require a lot of work on your part.

User Experience

User Experience or UX is yet another major concern of every site owner. This is true, especially for those who are building their websites in-house.

It goes without saying that the user-friendliness of the platform you are working with will play a big part in your final product’s design, effectiveness, and efficiency.

The PHP frameworks emphasize the functionality of the website more than its UX, leading to most websites having pretty basic UX. Creating a site with a great user experience using the PHP frameworks will take multiple times more effort than accomplishing the same thing with the WordPress CMS.

WordPress CMS has an attractive GUI and a less technical learning curve for developing websites with incredible UX. So, if you want to develop great websites with better clarity, WordPress would be the right choice.

SEO Benefits

Technically, we shouldn’t be talking about a website’s SEO while making a WordPress vs PHP comparison for building a website. After all, what we use to develop a website doesn’t affect a website’s SEO directly.

In fact, what the search engines look for while giving the website SEO scores is the relevance of the content and the smart use of keywords.

However, thanks to its built-in features and plugins, WordPress CMS does have a slight edge when it comes to improving technical and on-page SEO. Here’s a list of features or extensions that allows WordPress websites to handle SEO better than PHP sites:

  • XML Sitemaps: These in-built files allow search engine bots to understand your website’s structure and the relationships between your site pages better.
  • Practical Permalink: A WordPress site allows you to include the keywords in the page URLs more easily, helping you improve the page’s search engine rankings more efficiently.
  • SEO Plugins: With WordPress, you can use multiple SEO plugins to make your content SEO-friendly with ease.

Even though you still need to make other efforts like keyword research and following proper SEO guidelines, having these features makes it easier for your site to rank in Google SERPs.

Conclusion: Choosing WordPress or PHP Framework for Your Website

If you have read this article to this point, you should have a clear idea of which one meets your criteria for developing a website.

If you are looking for flexibility and have an extensive coding experience in PHP, you are probably going to choose the custom PHP framework. However, if you are putting more emphasis on website security, ease of use, and SEO benefits, you should choose the WordPress CMS.

Of course, you need to do your own research and learn more about the other subtle factors before making the final decision.

In short, you should make a decision based on what features you want your site to have and other needs. We recommend you think about the long-term goals when making a choice instead of short-term gratification or other people’s opinions.