Laravel, Symfony, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Yii, Zend. Phalcon, FuelPHP are only some of the top PHP frameworks in the market today.
Yet Laravel is the most used framework. There are over 135,607 websites made with Laravel, which is a lot more than the contribution of the other top PHP frameworks.
That’s not by chance. Rather, it’s because of the many unique features that it offers. Such as its MVC architecture, beginner-friendly nature, Laravel Artisan Console to quickly automate repetitive tasks and many more.
These help laravel programmers save time during the development of the project, it saves costs for the clients and reduces errors. All these are the goals that everyone wants in his or her project.
In this article, we’ll cover the top eight reasons why you should use Laravel to develop your app.
Let’s dive right in.
What makes Laravel the best PHP framework?
Following are the top reasons that make Laravel the best PHP framework:
1. High-Speed Websites
In today’s fast-paced world, users want websites and applications that load fast. And clients want to deliver that.
Laravel is an excellent backend framework for creating such projects, thanks to its powerful caching capabilities.
Memcached and Redis are two common cache backends that are supported in Laravel by default.
So you don’t have to spend additional time trying to configure a caching back-end that can speed up your website or app because Laravel will do it automatically.
Not only that, but Laravel supports multiple cache configurations as well. That’s great news for large projects that require excessive data reloads. This feature can help you speed up the app or website.
2. Easy Task Scheduling
All websites and apps have to complete a list of tasks every day or at a scheduled time. These could be sending out notifications, emails, clearing outdated data and so on.
Laravel command scheduler can help you automate all such mundane tasks and adhere to best practices for laravel development.
Before this feature, developers had to manually generate a Cron entry for each task – which was tedious and just added more work for the developer.
Now, you just need to add one Cron entry and your project will be good to go.
Since this feature of Laravel saves your time during the development phase, it makes Laravel one of the best frameworks to use.
3. Excellent User Authentication
Oftentimes, websites or apps require users to log in to their accounts on the platform, make purchases, enter payment information, or upload data.
Laravel makes it super easy to authenticate the user’s data in such websites by using its plug-and-play authentication system. It speeds up the authentication process to help your users move on to the next stage faster.
Plus, the authentication configuration happens out-of-the-box. If you want to change any function, then you can do that too by going to config/auth.php.
4. Built-in Mail and Messaging API
If the website you’re creating has to send out notifications, emails, reminders and such messages to the subscribers, then you could use the task scheduling feature of Laravel that we’ve covered above.
Or you could integrate a mail and messaging system because Laravel offers a built-in API service for this.
Using the mail API, you could use the SwiftMailer library drivers and integrate Mailgun, SparkPost or PHP’s “sendmail”.
That’ll allow you to send messages over the local networks or on the cloud. It makes the administrative duties of the webmaster a lot easier, which is why Laravel is becoming a favorite for developing PHP projects.
If you’re looking for some inspiration for your next Laravel development project, check out our article “5 Awesome Projects to Inspire your Next Laravel Development“.
5. Good Security Features
You need to protect your user’s data as well as the client’s data no matter what kind of project you’re working on.
But that’s especially true if you’re building an app for finance managers, healthcare, personal security, bank etc.
Laravel offers in-built security features which are great for such high-profile projects and adhere to best practices for laravel security. The ecosystem protects the website or app against SQL injections, phishing attacks, cross-site scripting and so on.
The default security system of Laravel is easy to use even for new developers and there’s a community of programmers available to help you if you need it.
But since this is a sensitive issue and should be done right, you can also hire Laravel development services to build rock-solid security for your website or app.
6. Automated Testing
Developers love Laravel because it comes with a phpunit.xml file and PHP unit support testing by default. This saves up so much time that would otherwise be wasted on manual testing of the code.
It helps you test each component or integration as you go along.
You don’t have to wait for the entire app or website to be ready to test it. That allows you to fix errors quickly and ensure that the quality of your project is maintained throughout.
7. Message Queue Features
The best development framework is the one that makes your job easier. Laravel does that with its prioritised message queuing system.
Here you can tell the framework what kinds of messages take priority over the others and it’ll make sure that your users get the important messages first.
For example, if you have an eCommerce site, then sending users an email regarding their purchase confirmation will be more critical than telling them about your new sale.
So instead of manually having to sort through the thousands of messages coming into your website, you can automate this and sit back in your chair and relax.
8. Error and Exception Handling System
Nearly all websites and apps these days have some type of form that users fill out. These could be for entering their credit card information, shipping address, signing up for the email list and so on.
Forms can be difficult to manage when users enter the wrong information or wrong type of information – such as entering the month in place of the year.
Laravel offers an easy solution to this issue in the form of its validation of errors feature. And that’s one of its best features. For this, you can configure the Monolog logging library and that’ll support several log handlers for your website.
That’ll give your users instant messages when they enter the wrong information. It speeds up the error handling process for you and it’s convenient for the user as well.
The Takeaway
The technical advantages offered by Laravel make it one of the best frameworks to use. Some people argue that it’s becoming irrelevant, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Laravel keeps coming out with newer and better versions. That’s because there is a demand for the framework.
If you want to create a truly robust app or website today, then give Laravel a try and you won’t be disappointed.