How to choose between WordPress, Laravel and Statamic.

Step 01 of 06

What are you actually building?

Three rough buckets. Most projects sit cleanly in one.

A brochure or content site

Marketing site. Blog. Case studies. Lots of pages, not much logic. Editors update content; visitors read it. WordPress or Statamic.

A web app or platform

User accounts. Workflows. Payments. Bespoke logic that no off-the-shelf product covers. Laravel.

A hybrid

Marketing site at the front, app behind the login. The honest answer is two systems , either two codebases that share auth, or a Statamic-front / Laravel-back combination.

Step 02 of 06

Who edits content, and how often?

This is the question that flips most decisions.

• Daily editing by a non-technical marketing team: WordPress. The familiarity is real, the recruitment market is huge, and your editors will be productive on day one.
• Weekly or monthly editing by a small team: Statamic. The control panel is calmer, the surface area is smaller, and editors stop asking “where do I click?” within a week.
• No editor , developers only: Laravel. Don’t pay for a CMS your team will never touch.

If the honest answer to "who edits" is "I don't really know yet", please decide before you pick a platform. It's genuinely the highest-leverage decision in the entire project.

Step 03 of 06

Performance and scale.

Most small-to-medium business sites run comfortably on any of the three. Where it starts to matter:

• Tens of thousands of pages, frequent editor changes: WordPress (mature caching) or a custom Laravel build with intentional architecture. Statamic’s flat-file model gets unwieldy at very high page counts.
• High concurrent traffic with logged-in users: Laravel , you control the queue, the cache, and the database. WordPress can do it but you’ll fight the framework.
• Marketing-site with predictable read load: Statamic, end of conversation. Static caches are aggressive, the result is exceptionally fast.

Step 04 of 06

Budget and timeline.

Indicative ranges in 2026, for a freelance senior build:

• WordPress , small marketing site £5k,£15k; mid-size business site £15k,£40k; complex content platform £40k+.
• Statamic , brochure / marketing £6k,£18k; mid-size content site £18k,£45k. Slightly higher up-front for the content modelling work; lower year-three maintenance.
• Laravel , small internal tool / admin £8k,£20k; mid-size web app £25k,£75k; full platform £75k+. Hugely scope-dependent.

Timelines: most decent business sites take six to twelve weeks from kickoff to launch, regardless of platform. Web apps take longer because the scope is wider.

Year-three maintenance

WordPress is the highest (plugin churn, updates, occasional breakages). Statamic and Laravel are lower (smaller surface area, less plugin sprawl).

Step 05 of 06

Decision matrix.

If you’re still on the fence, find your row in the table:

Step 06 of 06

Examples from real work.

It helps to see the decisions in production.

WordPress , Coeliac UK

Charity site with 50,000+ members, daily editing across a content team, and a deep ecosystem of resources, recipes and member features. WordPress was the right call , mature ecosystem, familiar tooling for the editor team, and proven for the scale. See the case study.

Laravel , Utilita Energy

Internal operations app for one of the UK’s largest energy suppliers. Custom workflows, dashboards, integrations. Built in Laravel with Filament for the admin interface. Not the kind of thing you’d try to bend WordPress into. See the case study.

Statamic , this site

Marketing site, occasional editing, design-led. Statamic was the obvious pick , calm editor experience, fast at rest, and the content lives in the repo alongside the code. See the uses page for the full stack.