# From Custom CMS to Laravel: Key Improvements and Lessons Learned

## **From Custom CMS to Laravel: Key Improvements and Lessons Learned**

Migrating a website from a custom CMS to one of the robust frameworks—i.e., Laravel—implicates considerable improvement in performance, speed of development, and scalability. Italian furniture ProStudio <https://www.italianskaia-mebel.ru/> is one of the strong cases that can be used to illustrate improvements to flexibility, scalability, and ease of development. The article takes a reader through their journey of migration, differences between a custom CMS and Laravel, and critical improvements achieved.

### **Why Migrate from a Custom CMS to Laravel?**

All the companies are facing scalability and maintenance problems with their custom CMS. Likewise, Italian furniture ProStudio is a furniture retailer website, which, working with its custom CMS, faced inflexibility in adding new features and encountered website speed issues while growing content. On the other hand, Laravel provides a fully fledged framework for more productive development with greater scalability for a better user experience.

### **Custom CMS vs. Laravel on Flexibility, Ease in Development, and Scaling**

Both Laravel and custom CMS have different ways of developing web applications with advantages to each. The fact is that more often than not, Laravel outperforms the custom solutions, giving them a run for their money in case of long-term growth. Below is a comparison of Italian furniture ProStudio's transition from a custom CMS to Laravel in three primary areas: flexibility, ease of development, and scalability.

| Requirements        | Custom CMS                                  | Laravel                                                  |
| ------------------- | ------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------- |
| Flexibility         | Rigidity of structure restricts flexibility | Highly flexible as MVC architecture provides flexibility |
| Ease of Development | Limited                                     | Smooth-sailing with built-in libraries                   |
| Scalability         | Limited and expensive to scale              | Easily scalable with modular approach                    |
| Community Support   | Least or proprietary                        | With broad, totally free-source community                |
| Security            | Basic or limited                            | Advanced out-of-the-box security                         |

### **Key Benefits of Migration to Laravel for Italian furniture ProStudio**

* **Flexibility**: Laravel's model-view-controller architecture easily integrates features, organizing code in such a way as to provide Italian furniture ProStudio with the flexibility needed to perform updates on content, add products, and enhance user interfaces.
* **Modular Architecture**: Modules can be added or removed without interfering with the system, allowing Italian furniture ProStudio to add new features like product filters and customer feedback functions with minimal disruptions.
* **Easy Integrations**: Laravel supports a wide range of plugins and libraries, which was helpful for Italian furniture ProStudio in integrating third-party tools for marketing and analytics that weren’t possible with the previous CMS.

### **Ease of Development: Simplified Coding and Debugging**

Laravel offers developers out-of-the-box tools, excellent documentation, and an enormous community that makes coding, testing, and debugging much easier.

* **Blade Templating Engine**: Blade allowed Italian furniture ProStudio's development group to reuse HTML templates throughout the pages without redundant code, making development speedier and more effective.
* **Eloquent ORM**: Laravel's Eloquent ORM provided a major improvement over manual SQL coding, making it easier to retrieve and manipulate data.

### **Scalability: Accommodating Traffic and Growth of Content**

One of the major problems that Italian furniture ProStudio faced with their custom CMS was scalability. As their catalog grew, along with the user database, the site started experiencing performance issues. Laravel's modular and scalable architecture helped Italian furniture ProStudio overcome these issues.

* **Data Management**: Laravel's support for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and other databases provided flexibility for changing or upgrading databases as needed.
* **Horizontal Scaling Support**: Laravel's architecture supports horizontal scaling, ensuring that performance remains strong even with high traffic or an expanded product listing.

### **Migration Process: Step-by-Step Transformation of Custom CMS to Laravel**

The process of migration from a custom CMS to Laravel required careful planning to avoid disruptions. <https://www.italianskaia-mebel.ru/> migrated in the following key stages:

* **Assessment and Requirements Gathering**: Preliminary assessment of the current CMS, database structure, and performance issues were completed before migration.
* **Database Migration and Structuring**: The custom CMS database was improved to work with Laravel, with tables and data structures migrated for compatibility.
* **Build Frontend using Blade Templates**: Blade allowed the development team to define a partial layout once for both product pages and categories, improving site navigation.
* **Software Testing and Quality Assurance**: Extensive testing in a staging environment ensured that any performance bugs, broken links, or unexpected downtimes were resolved before going live.

### **Issues and Lessons Learnt in the Migration Process**

#### **Challenges Faced**

* **Data Complexity**: Data had to be cleaned and transformed, which proved to be time-consuming.
* **New Development Patterns**: Some team members needed to learn the MVC framework of Laravel.
* **SEO Consistency**: Redirects and SEO needed to be carefully managed.

#### **Key Lessons Learnt**

* **Thorough Planning Saves Time**: Detailed planning with requirements and timelines was invaluable.
* **Laravel Training**: Training on Laravel before migration improved team efficiency.
* **Continuous Testing**: Ongoing testing minimized issues and provided a smoother transition.

### **FAQs**

#### What are the major advantages of migration from a custom Content Management System to Laravel?

Such flexibility, ease of development, and ability to scale can be hugely improved by migrating from a custom CMS to Laravel. The MVC structure of Laravel allows it to develop applications that are feature-rich, easily integrate third-party tools, and are scalable with the growth of the website.

#### How does Laravel enhance the scalability of a website?

The modular architecture of Laravel, support for horizontal scaling, and advanced caching mechanisms make websites highly scalable, handling heavy traffic and content loads effectively.

#### Does data migration involve too many hassles while migrating from CMS to Laravel?

If the custom CMS uses a different database structure, data migration may be complicated. Careful pre-planning, data transformation, and testing help minimize issues.

#### Does migration to Laravel affect the SEO ranking?

This relocation can retain or even improve SEO rankings if supported by the right redirects, meta tags, and URL structures. SEO best practices during migration are essential.

#### What is the biggest advantage of the templating engine Blade, featured in Laravel?

Blade enables developers to create reusable templates, reducing code redundancy and enhancing speed and consistency in site frontend management.

#### Can a non-developer still benefit from using Laravel over a custom CMS?

Though Laravel is developer-oriented, non-developers benefit indirectly from a more stable and efficient user experience.

### **Conclusion**

In brief, migrating from a proprietary CMS to Laravel provided Italian furniture ProStudio's website with flexibility, scalability, and ease of development. Each stage of the migration was carefully guided, helping Italian furniture ProStudio create a solid foundation for future growth and user value. Migration to Laravel proved a highly scalable and developer-friendly solution for the business.
