Good suggestion, but he said budget is very low, so is there a free solution out there?
I actually bought the exact thing OP is trying to sell on Etsy using the method I just described. The seller had uploaded a lot of examples of different types of work they could create so I had an idea of what they could do before I purchased.
I dont think this entire setup costs 200 dollars.
It is truly terrible. I cannot recommend enough to anyone to keep as far away from it as possible.
I just developed a blog using laravel, and while I see the difference in complexity, I dont see how security/maintenance is affected.
For maintenance, well if something breaks (especially plugins, etc), it’s much easier to fix it when the code is clean (like a proper Laravel-based project) than the mess that WP is.
Finally performance isn’t that good again compared to a bespoke Laravel app or a more modern platform (for blogging, Ghost comes to mind).