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6 Comments

Wordpress or custom blog?

I have a website I'm building with laravel but plan to have a blog on it eventually. Would it be better to install wordpress so that when people click Blog in the nav, it takes them to a wordpress blog, or should I just continue with Laravel and have a basic page for displaying the list of posts and link to each individual post? That would be fairly easy so I guess I'm wondering what strengths WP would bring to the table, and what the benefits would be of setting up and using it just for the blog section.

Thanks!

  1. 4

    Why reinvent the wheel? Spend that time making your product better.

    With wordpress it's all there out of the box:

    • It handles all of the SEO related needs, love the yoast plugin
    • multi user, so you can hire writers if you want, manage drafts, publish when you want
    • wsiwyg editor
    • it just works, no debugging, no errors
    • it's free
    • mostly effortless to setup from a time perspective

    I'm sure there is more that I can't think of right now.

    I could definitely build all of that if I wanted to, but seems unnecessary when wordpress is being maintained and has so many plugins to enhance it.

  2. 1

    I've been through this question on a few different sites, both as an employee and for my own projects. What it really comes down to is how integrated you need or want the blog to be with everything else.

    If it doesn't need to be integrated, just use WordPress. A good example of this is Buffer. They have a SaaS product and they have a blog to bring in traffic and drive people to it. Since they don't need integration between the two, there's no need for them to build their own content system.

    If you do need it to be integrated, then build everything in your framework, Laravel in this case. A good example of a usecase for this is Codementor. Besides their platform for software tutoring and contracting, they also have a significant content push. However their experts' blog posts also contain calls to action to contract their services via the platform and experts' profiles also show titles and topics of articles they've written. This kind of integration was a very good reason not to use WP or one of the static site generators others here are mentioning and it was worth it for them to invest the resources to build it.

    Which is your site more like?

  3. 1

    What about GitHub Pages, Jekyll or Netlify? For a really simple blog, WordPress is overkill, while doing it from scratch in let's say Laravel is reinventing the wheel for no need.

  4. 1

    Have you considered a static site generator like jekyllrb.com or blog.getpelican.com? It has some advantages like:

    • Really fast loading (it is static)
    • Extremely cheap (can host in S3, github pages, or even at home)

    We are running, for example: https://thegurus.tech as a pelican blog, or my personal website https://davidadrian.cc

    To publish an entry just drop a .md file into a folder. Easy and fast.

    1. 1

      Oh cool thanks. I wasn't aware of those, I'll check them out.

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