I think if wordpress fits for your needs you should follow using wordpress. Laravel is not a CMS is a framework. Wordpress, joomla (drupal (?)) are powerfull CMS plataforms focused to blog and multiblogs. I have done a lot of thing with wordpress, custom themes, widgets, plugins...and for news web, blog web, portafolio...was enough. But Laravel (cackephp, symfony...) is a framework that can be used to do exactly what you want and how you want, you can do a custom backend, a REST API, a SPA app, a intranet, a blog, a crm... Big effort is needed in wordpress to do big changes like that. It depends on what you need, but I think if we talk about building a common multiblog (user,roles,posts,comments,images...) or blog Is it faster with wordpress. It's faster (if we want cool admin panel...), not as customizable as an app that you building starting with a custom design and focusing on your needs. It's faster but not as flexible as building an app with laravel, for example buildin REST API, or for example changing any thing. And very important, the weekness of mots plugins, widgets you find in wordpress aren't tested with phpunit, or aren't build applying TDD. But the best thing, try it and you will see it.

Stick with WordPress because it's the best. There is a giant community. If your blog is not fast first find out why. If you want I can analyse it for you for free of charge using chrome pagespeed and yslow and other tools or you can do it your self. If you really want speedy really, I would suggest you to check Phalcon Framework.

http://tr.cm/11aj

Phalcon looks very good, But I think stephenmilley was asking how easy or fast could be a blog built in Laravel, or any other Framework if you want to compare with phalcon. And your info was very good but In my opinion phalcon is fast if we are talking about response speed, resource consumption

@ekaitzastiz He asked no such thing.

Blogging with wordpress is fine, developing in wordpress is hell. your choice.

But then, if you choose laravel you have to build the blog from scratch using laravels tools, wich takes time and effort. especialy if you want to have all the functionality of wordpress