- It’s open-source, so the costs of development and maintenance are lower;
- Think about future growth, enabling further adding of customizable and scalable solutions is what will come in handy;
- Variety of plug-ins, templates, and components you can easily integrate into your website;
- Strong security is guaranteed by the out-of-the-box safety features;
- Mobile optimized and compatible with various operating systems websites can help you enrich your customer base;
- You can rely on getting support and advice from the big developers’ community.
Best PHP framework for e-commerce
As long as the overwhelming majority of the developers opt for PHP, there is no shortage for PHP frameworks available. For the comparison, let’s take a look at the three of them (Symfony, Laravel, and Yii) and overview their pros and cons.
Symfony
Symfony is considered to be one of the oldest PHP frameworks as its history goes back to 2005. As time has passed, Symfony has proven its reliability to the developers for being among the most stable frameworks.
The advantages of Symphony include its high flexibility. You can easily integrate it with other projects and install them on different platforms. Another plus is its high performance. The compatibility with operational systems is also great. It also allows for interoperability.
The apparent downside that may occur is difficulty in understanding its mechanism for novices in web development.
Laravel
Laravel has a bunch of features that it shares with Symfony. However, this one is claimed to be the most popular open-source PHP framework. It is relatively young, its history started in 2011. Laravel makes such tasks as caching, security, routing, and authentication much easier and developer-friendly.
Among the advantages of Lavarel is the possibility to build complex apps and customization features like data migration and MVC architecture support. Besides, it unsure of the high level of security that is the life force of any eCommerce website.
Being a young and rapidly developing a framework, the developers may find difficulties with new bugs occurrence.
Yii
The Yii framework appeared in 2008. It is prominent for using a lazy loading technique that enables high-speed loading time.
As for the pros, Yii can be easily integrated with other frameworks (for example Zend). Besides great performance, it requires a little memory space. Yii offers useful security features including cookie tampering. Due to this, a framework is a good option for the development of e-commerce projects.
Yii is the one with the fastest performance out of the three on our list, if not among all the php frameworks
Unfortunately, Yii doesn’t allow creating complex web apps, thus being the biggest its drawback.
Performance issues
When choosing the right framework for developing an e-commerce website, we strongly advise you to pay special attention to performance. There are several factors having an impact on performance. For example, bad code can have a negative effect.
As for the Performance And The Database correlation, it’s also important to minimize the number of SQL queries hitting the DB servers as much as possible.
Bear in mind to keep your DB structure appropriate, using indexes right, identifying the most widely used tables for reading and which ones used for writing. If we talk about MySQL, you may try to configure storage engines accordingly.
Performance is also affected by such cache systems as Memcache or Redis If multiple servers are involved in your application work, you need to access session data from some common store.
Choosing an E-commerce Platform
In case you feel like you don’t need or want to use PHP frameworks, you can still opt for an eCommerce platform. There is plenty of them, however, they are less geared at meeting the needs of specifically your business.
Choosing the perfectly suiting eCommerce platform may turn out to be a real challenge. Below you can find an overview of the most popular platforms:
