Website Modernization: PHP, Laravel & CMS Upgrades

Because the version number tells only part of the story. Laravel upgrades one major version at a time: Laravel 5 needs eight consecutive steps to reach 13, and on a large project each step is its own small project. The audit shows which case you are in, so you pay for what your site needs, not for our uncertainty.

Because it is real work: a senior developer reads your code and dependencies, and a project manager plans the upgrade. You get a written report with the upgrade path, a fixed price and a timeline, and it is yours to use with us or with any other team.

Technical debt accrues interest. Every year you wait adds another version to the path, the old version stops receiving security patches, hosting providers retire it and new integrations refuse to install. Upgrading now is almost always cheaper than an emergency later.

Partly. We use AI in every upgrade ourselves. But it only sees the code it is shown, not your hosting, email, DNS or search indexing, and its most dangerous mistakes are silent, like lost contact form emails. On anything with payments or years of custom code, you need a developer who knows what to check.

We are responsible for our work: if something that worked before breaks because of the upgrade, we fix it at our cost within 30 days after release. Changes made later by other developers, administrators or the hosting provider are outside our control, which is why you receive notes on everything we changed.

No. All work happens on a closed copy. The switch takes minutes, and a rollback stays ready until you confirm everything works.

No. Addresses stay the same, and we check indexing, redirects, canonical tags and sitemaps before and after the release. The live site is never closed to search engines.

From a few days for a small site to several weeks for a large project. The audit gives you an exact timeline along with the estimate.

Sometimes, yes. If the upgrade would cost close to a new build, we say so honestly in the audit and show both options side by side.

Laravel, OpenCart, WordPress and custom PHP projects.

Yes. Every client gets access to our project portal: stages, approvals, documents and requests in one place.

A supported one, and preferably not the one closest to its end. PHP 8.2 receives security fixes only until 31 December 2026, PHP 8.3 until the end of 2027 and PHP 8.4 until the end of 2028. The target is the newest version that the platform and its modules support, which the audit checks: the Trichocosmetics store went from PHP 5.6 to PHP 8.4 on OpenCart 3.0.5.1, and Laravel 13 needs PHP 8.3 or newer.

Not by itself. A newer framework loads more code and a newer PHP runs it faster, so the two often roughly cancel out. The gains come from what the audit finds around the code: on one Laravel project, server response fell from about 55 to about 21 milliseconds once OPcache, a hosting setting nobody had switched on, was enabled. Google measures speed by the Core Web Vitals of real visitors, so compare the field data in Search Console before and after.

Each one gets a decision in the audit: update it where a maintained version exists, replace it, or wrap it in a small compatibility layer so that the code calling it keeps working. Packages nothing uses any more are removed. On one Laravel project an abandoned forms library sat behind more than 200 admin form fields, and a compatibility layer kept them all working without a field by field rewrite.

Yes. The audit is the same whoever wrote the code: versions, packages, hosting, access and integrations. When the previous developer has gone, nobody has the access and no one knows how releases reach the live site, the work starts with a project takeover, with an audit from $3,000, and the upgrade follows from its results.

Access to the hosting or server, the code repository if there is one, the DNS settings of the domain and the admin panel. Add a short list of what the site must not lose: the forms and the mailboxes leads go to, payments, connections to a CRM or accounting, and the pages that bring search traffic. If some access is missing, say so at the start: recovering it becomes part of the plan.

Usually not in the same release. When the code and the look change at once, it is hard to tell what caused a problem after launch. The Trichocosmetics store kept its original design through the upgrade, and on the Trichology Institute site the design refresh started once the foundation was current. If the interface itself is in question, a usability audit, from $1,500, shows where people struggle before anyone redraws the pages.