How Laravel Performance Optimization Works: 15 Tips to Follow

Laravel Performance Optimization is a buzzing topic as the prominent PHP framework holds great stakes in the web development market. Trusted for its exceptional backend development, Laravel is one of the most popular web development frameworks. It offers quick application development through MVC architecture, a huge set of libraries, and more features. With Laravel web development becomes much easy, which eventually cuts down on the cost of project development. Moreover, you can optimize an existing Laravel app to increase performance, speed, and other features. This will boost the website visibility, increase visitor engagement, build more customers, and upsurge the revenue.

Why Should Businesses Focus on Laravel Performance Optimization?

Any business has several layers of operations and it needs software that connects all these logical aspects to deliver result-oriented outcomes. Whether it’s the customers, the stakeholders, or the visitors, everybody should get a concise answer on visiting the site or portal. The prime focus lies on information management, which leads to better decision-making and growth of the company.

Laravel with its architecture and libraries opens an avenue to create applications that incorporate all business goals, without extra effort from the developers. This makes it apt for building enterprise-level corporate websites and applications. Such apps play a pivotal role in the success of the business. So, Laravel offers features that serve the purpose of building web applications, on-point.

How Does Laravel Performance Optimization Work?

If you have a Laravel site that has lost speed, and ranking over the years, then it’s time to improvise it. You must know that now is the time to enhance its speed, engagement calibre, functionality, and more, to tap into more traffic from the internet.

Prerequisites for Laravel Optimization

After discussing the benefits, let us come to the point and start the actual work. For this, you need to have the following:

• A Laravel application hosted on a web server
• Preferably Laravel 9.0 version
• PHP 8.0
• MariaDB

Make sure that the application is using an efficient hosting service to avoid any server-level issues.

15 Tips for Perfect Methods of Laravel Optimization

1. Config Caching

Use the following command to boost the performance of your Laravel application.

php artisan config:cache

After you run this command, any changes would not have any effect. So, you can refresh it by running the command again.

To clear the config cache, run the following command

php artisan config:clear

It is not the best practice to run this command during local development as there could be multiple changes time and again. It is recommended to use OPcache which acts by caching the PHP code.

2. Routes Caching

Another way of Laravel optimization is route caching, which is best suitable for applications with multiple routes and configurations. You just need to execute the following command for pacing up Laravel performance.

php artisan route:cache

You need to run this command after every change made to the config or route files. If not, then it will load the previous changes in the cache. You can clear the cache file by the following command

php artisan route:clear

3. Get rid of any unused services

As a framework that offers quick building of applications, Laravel offers many features. For example, it offers auto-loading of all the services listed in the config/app.php file. Now, your particular project may not need all of these services. So, it is better to disable the unused services. This step will optimize the performance of your application.

4. Classmap optimization

Generally, the framework calls numerous files to include requests. A quick tip is to combine all the requests in a single file and call just that file. This can be achieved by the following command

php artisan optimize –-force

5. Optimize Composer

There is a tool called Composer which Laravel uses to keep an eye on the various dependencies. Once Composer is installed, dev dependencies are loaded by default. They help in pacing up website development but are of no use once the site is launched. In fact, they would reduce the speed of the website.

To prevent this, use the following command

composer install –prefer-dist –no-dev –o

The command retrieves the package excluding the dev dependencies.

6. Reduce the Libraries

Laravel offers a huge number of libraries. All are not required for your application. The unnecessary ones, in fact, reduce the performance by a considerable margin. This impacts the end-user experience. Therefore, it is advisable to remove libraries that are not in use, from the config/app.php file. Also, check the composer.json file for any unused libraries and remove them as well.

7. JIT Compiler

Speed gets affected when a PHP code is converted to bytecode. For this, the Zend engine works on all C subroutines. This process gets repeated every time the app is run, even though it should run just once. So, developers use Just-In-Time compilers. HHVM is the best JIT compiler for Laravel.

8. Keep a check on the Fast Cache and Session Driver

To boost the performance of a Laravel application, it is best to store the cache and session in the RAM. For the session driver, make changes in the app/config/session.php, and for the cache driver, modify the app/config/cache.php

9. Caching the most used query results is a great idea

While there are many frequently asked queries, which are repeated time and again. Storing such answers in the cache is a good way to optimize Laravel9.

You can use the remember function for it, which is as below

$posts = Cache::remember('index.posts', 30, function()
{return Post::with('comments', 'tags', 'author', 'seo')->whereHidden(0)->get();});

10. Precompile Assets

The code of the application is stored in separate files to manage things in a better way. Developers can use the following commands to optimize the performance at this level.

php artisan optimize
php artisan config:cache
php artisan route:cache

11. Static Assets and CDN

Developers can improve the performance of their Laravel application by loading the static assets file from the CDN server. The visitor or customer information is stored in the nearest Cloudflare CDN< which can then provide this data very quickly. So, make sure that your static assets like JS, CSS, HTML, etc. should be described in the Cloudflare CDN.

12. Assets Bundling

Laravel Mix can be fine-tuned by combining several stylesheets in a common file. You can use the following script for this.

mix.styles([
'public/css/vendor/normalize.css',
'public/css/styles.css'
], 'public/css/all.css');

So, we have created an all.css file that contains CSS from normalize.css and styles.css. It reduces the number of HTTP requests for these individual files, rather everything will be managed by calling the all.css file. Such measures help to improve the application performance.

13. Minifying the assets

When the CSS file is minified, it reduces the downloading time in the browser. This eventually reduces the overall loading time and boosts the performance of the site. For this, use the following command

$ npm run production

14. Use the latest version of PHP

Well, this goes without saying as the latest version will have all the features for performance boosting. Make sure that your application is running on the latest version, it truly helps! Laravel 10 is the latest of all versions.

15. Use Laravel Debugbar

This package monitors the performance of the application. It does not improve it but definitely helps to keep things in check. Therefore, it is highly recommended to use this package during application development.

These are a few of the ways for optimizing Laravel applications. You can check with the community and use the forums for more help.

Benefits of Laravel Performance Optimization

• Growth in the business: A high-performing application creates better engagement between visitors and customers. This increases the chances of sale and therefore, revenue. So, when you want to push the business to a higher knot, think of website or application optimization.
• Cuts down the development time and cost: By adding specific features, developers can reduce the time of developing a whole application from scratch. This saves a lot of time and money required to build an entirely new application.
• Better traffic management: An optimized site can handle traffic in a better sense. By improving the Laravel queue system, developers can open the floodgates for a boatload of traffic. This results in better visitor engagement, which can generate more customers.

The Final Words

We trust that this article will be beneficial to you. If you have a Laravel application that requires optimization, employ some or all of these suggestions to maximize its performance. KrishaWeb is a leading Laravel development company that provides assistance for building and optimizing applications. We have some of the best Laravel developers on our team. In case, you need any help from us, feel free to contact our team now!