Here are some of the most common website problems and solutions that marketers should be aware of, and how Laravel can help.
What is Laravel?
Website frameworks may not seem like an obvious concern for marketers, but in fact, they should care deeply. Their choice of framework may have long-term consequences for the scalability and security of their business, as well as brand and user experience (UX).
Laravel is an open-source, PHP-based web framework. Because it has a large ecosystem of products, marketers can easily add new functionalities such as full-text search or subscription management when the business needs it, without the need to write code from scratch. This makes Laravel a great choice for creating scalable applications and websites, allowing for an efficient development process.
Let’s look at a list of common website concerns and their solutions.
Laravel can help to solve many common issues.
1. My business is entering a high-growth phase and my system can’t keep up
Sooner or later, many companies run into website capacity problems. While there is always room for better planning at the outset, it is often the case that a new website looks excellent and seemingly has the capacity to grow with the business, only for developers to find out later that it's dragging the business down.
More often than not, the problem begins when your website becomes more popular than you anticipated, and the traffic slows the website down. This then leads to higher bounce rates (because of poor user experience), which you can usually solve through better server management.
Laravel has a package called Forge, for example, that allows developers to provision and deploy unlimited PHP applications on a variety of platforms. This means your website can reach high speeds and leave room for effective scaling. As the business grows, you can add more servers to deliver your content and manage the load on each of them. This approach also enables you to store big data remotely, instead of on your own database, which would also be a drain on your system.
Laravel also speeds up your system through its caching mechanism. If your business attracts frequent queries that trigger slow loading times, you can cache the results on local application servers. This makes loading speeds much faster, but requires some testing to make sure that you are not caching so often that the cache becomes slower than the direct database.
2. My business is becoming increasingly complex, and I can no longer customise my website to keep up
As your business grows and your products and services become more well known, you want to market your offering on more platforms and channels. You may also want to market products through a third-party provider, which would require a white-labelled solution. If you are running promotions, it may be necessary to tweak prices remotely on just a few of your platforms. All of these marketing headaches have the same solution: third-party API integration.
Third-party APIs enable coders to use existing code to build out your website’s functionality, instead of having to write the code themselves. This results in a massive time and cost saving for the business, and Laravel allows for quick, easy, and seamless integration through the simple installation of a PHP HTTP client that can send quick HTTP requests to third-party APIs.
The possibilities that the business can unlock through third-party APIs are almost limitless. If you are running a promotion on a social media platform like Twitter, an API integration allows you to display your Twitter feed on your website. If you want to add a chat feature, an API integration takes care of that as well. API integrations can also add value in the backend of your website, by keeping track of your competitors’ pricing, for instance.
3. Why, if one thing goes wrong, does everything seem to go wrong?
Unfortunately, there are still many websites that suffer from a monolithic architecture. This means that even a small glitch can cause the entire ecosystem to malfunction.
It is natural for the applications on your website to grow in size as the business evolves, but it also means that they require greater effort to manage as they become more complex. The more this happens, the less responsive and scalable the app becomes. They also become more difficult to alter when the need arises.
Laravel helps marketing teams avoid these common issues by splitting applications into micro-frontends, so that even when something goes wrong with one app, the website can continue to function. This sets the website up for the future because it also reduces development time and complexity.
With Laravel, developers can create a robust framework that supports individual products that interact seamlessly and dynamically with each other, allowing multiple streams of work. Yet, they remain separate so that a problem with one doesn’t affect the others.
4. My front-end CMS works well, but my backend is not delivering, and I cannot have enough integrations
Marketers are often understandably loath to change a website. While rebranding and a fresh website design can be a useful exercise, change is not always necessary, particularly when customers have grown to love and interact with what they know. Therefore, being happy with website front end, but unhappy with the backend, shouldn’t mean a complete revamp.
What the business really requires is an add-on to plug into the backend. With Laravel, web developers do not have to create work where it is not required. Developers also don’t have to struggle with coding, as Laravel’s open-source code is completely transparent. They can get all the answers they need from the Laravel community, which specialises in joint problem solving.
5. I can’t make my required changes quickly
Change is constant, and marketers require a responsive website that accommodates changes quickly and seamlessly. In reality, when you make changes, they can create a host of unexpected technical issues, meaning your customers run into 404 pages, broken links, slow page loading and other common website usability problems.
If this happens too often, there is a good chance your website will need an upgrade to continue delivering a good user experience, but this is costly and time consuming.
As with the previous issue, Laravel allows you to easily make backend changes that plug into your live website ecosystem, without any downtime. And because the code you need is open-source, and therefore probably already exists, making the changes becomes that much easier and quicker, enabling you to avoid these common website problems.
6. My website keeps breaking with each release
One of the worst feelings in updating a website is that dread that everything will break when you deploy a new release. This makes being meticulous about quality assurance a must.
Fortunately, testing is at the core of Laravel’s functionality. In fact, the framework ships with helper methods that allow extensive application testing. Developers can do unit testing, which tests small portions of code for correctness, and feature testing, which looks at how well the pieces of code interact with each other to ensure that your system functions as a whole.
This extensive testing means that marketing teams and their development partners can iron out any potential problems before deploying your website release, safe in the knowledge that it will function as intended, whether on computers or mobile devices.
7. My website is getting security issues
Website security is an important concern for any business, no matter how large or small. Poor security can bring the website, and the business, to a standstill, or lead to sensitive data leaks, putting your users’ financial and contact information at risk. While it is true that website security requires daily vigilance from IT, the website’s framework itself can make this task much less onerous.
In this respect, Laravel has one of the best names in the industry. Even better, it takes care of most security concerns automatically. It also allows you to plug in other security applications such as CAPTCHA to further enhance your security, and after obtaining an SSL certificate, you can easily set it up using Laravel.
8. I want to change my hosting, but my current website limits my options
One of the biggest legacy issues a business can face is being stuck with a website hosting service that is too expensive and still not delivering the goods. To compound matters, some websites are quite particular, and you are not able to take your business to many other hosts.
Because Laravel is cloud agnostic, marketing teams can deploy their sites and apps onto any cloud system, or across multiple systems, from anywhere, making it compatible with the hosting policy of your business.
