I run a small agency out of Istanbul building corporate websites for small and medium businesses — clinics, hygiene service providers, IT partners. Almost every prospective client asks the same question upfront: "Are you doing this in WordPress?" My answer is usually no, and here's the technical reasoning behind it.
The attack surface problem
A typical WordPress install for a corporate site ends up with 15-30 plugins: SEO, forms, caching, security, page builders, backups, image optimization. Each plugin is an independent codebase, independently maintained, independently vulnerable. The WPScan vulnerability database alone tracks thousands of plugin CVEs, and a huge share of real-world WordPress compromises trace back to outdated or poorly maintained plugins rather than WordPress core itself.
With Laravel, the surface area is defined by what you actually write. No bundled functionality you don't use sitting there as dead weight with a CVE waiting to happen. When I built a passive security scanning tool for security posture assessment — pulling from Shodan, crt.sh, SSL Labs, and the CIRCL CVE API — the difference in exposed surface between a lean Laravel deployment and a plugin-heavy WordPress site was stark just from open-source intelligence alone, no active scanning required.
