Hunting for something online is becoming easier day by day, just look up their website and you will know everything about a business.
But to create a user-friendly, and interactive website, robust web development is Important.
One of the crucial steps of creating a website is to choose the best framework for your web development and it also should include coding standards that are understandable and easy to use.
Frameworks that are developed better make it easy for you to focus on other issues of your business rather than only technicalities.
Still, it doesn’t matter if you’re a tech expert or someone who knows veritably little about Laravel. Because in this guide you’ll have all the knowledge related to Laravel.
What is laravel?
Laravel is a free, open-source, PHP web development framework used to create websites and web applications. Based on Symfony, Laravel follows a Model-View-Controller architectural pattern.
In 2011, Tyler Otwell created Laravel to provide a simplified option to make the web development process faster, smoother, and more interesting. Its features such as Artisan CLI have made all the hype about Laravel worth it. Since its creation, 10 versions have been released. Each version was improved and performed better than the previous one. The latest version was released in February 2023.
After getting the basic idea of what Laravel is, the first question that comes to mind is whether it is easy to use. Or is it the same as every other back-end framework that requires difficult coding? Well, to answer your question Laravel comes with a powerful Syntax that makes it easy to use.
Because it has many features that make developers choose Laravel among all other web frameworks.
Top features of laravel
MVC architecture
Laravel follows an MVC architectural pattern that specifies a set of rules on how to build scalable and maintainable web apps. It also helps in bringing consistency and structure to unstructured codes.
Eloquent ORM
Eloquent ORM (object-relational mapping) maintains relationships between database objects to interact easily. An Eloquent model can insert, update, delete, and can also retrieve records from the database table.
Query builder
Query Builder provides more direct database access to the Eloquent ORM. This feature has been available since 2012, Laravel 3. Laravel’s query builder is capable of building queries programmatically using a set of classes and methods.
Application logic
Application logic is implemented either by using controllers or as a part of the route declarations.
Blade
Blade Template Engine provides a set of control structures to internally map its control structures to identify their PHP counterparts. It also combines one or more templates with a data model to produce resulting views.
Statistics on laravel over the years
Now let’s see why Laravel is so popular among developers Globally. Statistics always puts a stronger impression than words.
- Laravel is licensed by MIT and is currently hosted on GitHub. According to the data, Laravel hosts more than 15 million websites, of which 711,178 are live websites.
- In 2022, this number was limited to 3,14,995 live websites. That means the popularity of Laravel has grown by 37% in a single year.
- The top 10% of developers were using Laravel in 2022.
- The USA alone has 294,413 websites made in Laravel, which makes it the largest user of Laravel Development.
- 18,535 Websites in India are currently using Laravel.
- 38,351 Websites are spending more than 1000$ on Laravel
To help you decide better, here’s a list of the benefits of using Laravel.
Benefits of using laravel
- Simplicity
- Flexibility
- Security
- Automated Testing
- Cost of websites
- Easy Maintenance
- Website Performance
- Third-party Integration
Simplicity
Laravel is one of the most familiar options available to most developers. Because of its range of built-in templates, it makes it easier for developers to create web developments with less coding. Also, Laravel is free and open source, which is why it is an easy-to-use framework.
Its Built-in file configuration makes it easy to identify and define URL routes. That means there are fewer chances of your URL being redirected.
Flexibility
With the help of its pre-installed, extensive libraries, Laravel allows developers to establish and authenticate a wide range of features for your site.
With the Flexibility that Laravel offers, developers can build a complete e-commerce site or a simple and professional B2B site. You can implement almost any idea into your website without spending tons of money.
Security
In current times, cybercrimes and cyberattacks are increasing day by day. That’s why it becomes so important for businesses to list their products on the most secure platforms and frameworks.
Laravel helps in setting up Advanced security features on any websites and web apps to improve security and protect from hackers and cybercriminals.
To get a little technical, Laravel has a Bcrypt hashing algorithm, which never allows for saving passwords in the database.
Its excellent user authentication and restricted access features are easy to create. And it helps fix security vulnerabilities and technical issues before your website gets deployed.
Automated testing
Laravel has built-in testing features that are used to test the application’s performance efficiency and effectiveness to perform without any errors or glitches. Developers can easily test fundamental user behavior and analyze results by unit testing of applications with their default testing frameworks.
Automated Testing assures faster testing of your project resulting in minimum to zero errors.
Cost of laravel websites
Being a free, open-sourced network is the biggest advantage of using Laravel. You can use it for free but after hiring a good developer to build your product. Projects on Laravel become cost-efficient as they’re easily developed and maintained over the years. The cost of using the Laravel framework is reduced compared to other back-end frameworks.
Easy maintenance
A few standout features of Laravel such as MVC architecture, Blade template engine, and clean code make website maintenance easy.
Ideally, websites and web apps built with Laravel are famous for their Easily maintained feature, but this might not always be true for every other website.
If in the future, you might want to add new features to your already-built websites, it becomes easy to add those features as you could pick up from where the previous development iteration was stopped.
Website performance
If you wish to grow your business, you will have to build a website that is sufficient to control the heavy traffic.
Laravel develops websites that can handle requests much faster than most other frameworks. It enables the ability to control time-consuming tasks, using a unique queuing system that can postpone certain website tasks and handle the rest of the tasks faster. This is how your website runs faster and smoother.
This reduces the overall cost of hosting and implements other speed optimization techniques to keep the server running.
I mean that’s why your website doesn’t crash when a wide range of users access it in a big way.
Third-party integration
Third-party integration has become a requirement for almost every other company’s website. Be it your company’s marketing tool, website chat, or custom payment gateway system.
Laravel’s basic APIs for integration are a solid choice for the web development process if your site demands integration with third-party apps.
Comparison with other back-end frameworks
Nearly 80% of websites use PHP frameworks on their server side.
Comparison with other PHP frameworks as per the data available on builtwith
With 711,178 Websites, Laravel is one of the most preferred frameworks because of its easy-to-use, flexible feature.
Also, it offers easy integration and comes with a built-in library that makes coding seamless.
Laravel offers all these advantages and more and is compatible with use but don’t you get the question in your head are all these theoretical or companies are using it?
| Company | Revenue | Industry | Foundation year | No. of Employees |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pfizer | $100.3 billion (‘22) | Pharmaceutical | 1849 | 83,000 (‘22) |
| BBC | $6.11 billion (‘21) | Mass Media | 1927 | 22,219 (‘21) |
| About You | $742 million (‘20) | e-commerce | 2014 | 700 (‘20) |
| TourRadar | $93.6 million (‘22) | Hospitality | 2010 | 200 (‘22) |
| Crowdcube | $14 million (‘22) | Finance | 2011 | 164 (‘22) |
top 5 websites built using laravel framework
Invoice Ninja
Invoice Ninja is an open-source invoicing program for businesses and freelancers. It gives a platform to process payments, monitor expenses, and produce custom invoices in one place.
Invoice Ninja uses a SaaS model that gives users the ability to utilize it either via their infrastructure or on a public cloud.
The PHP Framework helps them to attract more users and customize their permission levels.
Alison
Created using Laravel, Alison is one of the largest free e-learning platforms around the globe. It has more than 20 million students in 195 nations enrolled in a wide range of free courses.
This range of online courses and diplomas varies from sales & marketing, IT, Business, Health, Personal Development, Management, and Academics to Engineering.
The Flexibility and scalability feature of Laravel makes the website easily sharable across several platforms and makes it smooth to use.
Barchart
Barchart is one of the best applications created using Laravel for financial information all around the globe.
It is a platform that provides a quick overview of leading stock, forex, and cryptocurrency markets to traders and investors.
For fundamental and technical research of domestic as well as global markets, Barchart has a wonderful collection of tools.
As of January 2021, the platform crossed 3.7 million users.
My Rank
MyRank is another leading eLearning platform built with Laravel Framework. It uses Laravel’s flexibility to the fullest. It mixes usability with an excellent design which makes it a fantastic website.
MyRank is India’s top self-assessment platform. MyRank offers a wide range of online courses to students to achieve their academic goals.
MyRank has around 36, 402 students enrolled, 91,389 queries resolved, and 100, 568 tests taken.
Additionally, the framework allows users to manage an expanding database.
Alphacoders.com
To help writers and content developers connect with their fan base, Alphacoders.com was created through Laravel. Alphacoders.com is an open-source platform created to help creators earn money by monetizing their skills.
It is a great platform to search and use images, avatars, art, and much more content material.
It is very scalable and easily installable. Also, Laravel’s Blade template engine is used here to produce the resulting views
Laravel developer
Learning everything about Laravel was fun and there’s a community of professionals to help you constantly to make your website boost and run smoothly.
Laravel Community is one of the most active communities as it has 44k+ active users worldwide with 18k+ threads and resolves your issue in three days.
Laravel is one of the most famous PHP frameworks, which that means for any difficulty or issue there’s already a solution available on the internet. And it keeps getting updated as the community keeps on adding new functionalities, case scenarios, and features to the online library.
New Aspires can learn easily from the tutorials, articles, and experiences of other developers that are available in the online library.
Future of laravel
Frameworks like Laravel are the future of technology and they aren’t going to vanish anywhere anytime soon. So, this is a great time to start developing your applications with Laravel. It is a perfect choice for high-performance websites and is still maturing with every possible use case available.
Laravel has the most simple, flexible, and practical features which make it the most popular web framework among developers.
Laravel has vast Object-oriented libraries co-existing with pre-installed libraries, that are easy to implement into any web app or website.
From all the mentioned information, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the future of Laravel is going to grow and reach its peak soon and beyond.
Conclusion
In current times, many companies are migrating to Laravel for web application development.
Sure, it has some limitations but that should not stop you from doing any business. Also hiring a good Laravel developer will solve all your problems related to web development.
If your project involves high user traffic, exceptional security features, and heavy data sets, Laravel will serve you in the best way possible.
