Laravel Applications Built to Be Maintained, Not Just Shipped

Laravel when you want a complete framework with conventions already decided — auth, queues, migrations and admin tooling come included, and that's a real head start for business systems. Node when you need heavy real-time concurrency, or your team already writes JavaScript everywhere and a single language matters more. Both scale well; the deciding factor is usually your team and how much you want assembled for you.

Nearly always N+1 queries from Eloquent relationships loaded in a loop — effortless to write, invisible on seed data, brutal at scale. After that it's missing indexes and work being done in the request cycle that belongs in a queue. We measure query counts and read execution plans before changing code, because the slow page is often not the one people blame.

Yes, and we'd usually do it incrementally rather than as a rewrite. New routes get served by Laravel while the old application keeps running, and functionality moves across piece by piece. Big-bang PHP rewrites have a poor track record, mostly because the old code encodes business rules nobody wrote down.

It's a security question more than a feature one — once your PHP or Laravel version drops out of support, you stop getting patches. Upgrading is very manageable done one major version at a time, and the friction is usually third-party packages rather than Laravel itself. The longer it's left, the more of them have moved on.

Livewire when the front end is essentially forms, tables and CRUD — you keep one language and one codebase, and it's considerably less work. A separate React or Angular front end when the interface carries real client-side state, or when the same API has to serve mobile apps too. Choosing a SPA for a back-office tool is a common way to double the work for no benefit.

Laravel and PHP are part of our backend stack alongside Node.js. Our published case studies happen to be Node, Go and Next.js builds, so we won't point you at a Laravel one — if you'd like references specific to Laravel, ask and we'll tell you honestly what we can share.