Building Laravel applications is a popular choice for web developers, but as with any framework, performance optimization is a crucial aspect that should not be overlooked.
It goes without saying that application performance is especially critical for web applications, as it directly impacts user experience and conversion rates.
In this guide, we will discuss some of the best practices for Laravel optimization.
What is Laravel?
Laravel is a free, open-source PHP web framework that follows the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern. It comes with a great set of tools and features for building modern, maintainable web apps.
Since its release in June 2011, Laravel has attracted a huge following among developers because of its elegant syntax, powerful features, and strong community backing.
Even though it launched over a decade ago, Laravel remains a popular choice for developers. It keeps enhancing its core features, user-friendliness, and workflow to help developers build the best web applications.
Curious about Laravel? Check our blog: What is Laravel?
Benefits of Using Laravel
Laravel apps are built with performance, flexibility, and security in mind. Some of the key benefits of using Laravel include:
- Flexible – Laravel offers a wide range of out-of-the-box features, as well as the ability to incorporate third-party packages according to your specific needs.
- Template Engine – Laravel has its own template engine called Blade that simplifies the creation of views and layouts
- Strong Security – The built-in security features of Laravel help implement user authentication and authorization, with built-in functionality for user registration, login, and access control.
- MVC and Object-oriented Architecture – Laravel uses MVC architecture, which helps keep your code clean and separates different aspects, making everything more manageable and easier to scale.
- Eloquent ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) – Laravel’s ORM helps developers interact with databases without writing SQL code, making database management more efficient.
- Automated Unit Testing – The built-in PHPUnit testing library in Laravel helps ensure your code’s stability, making it easier to catch and fix bugs during the development process.
- Fast Application Performance – Laravel offers tools and features to optimize website performance, like caching, routing, and asset compilation, enhancing user experience.
10 Practices to Improve the Performance of Your Laravel Website
Are you looking to optimize your existing Laravel application or start a new one?
Either way, there are several best practices you can follow to improve the performance of your Laravel web app:
1. Update to the latest versions of PHP and Laravel
Like any hardware or software, features evolve with each version. For example, a website with different PHP versions will show significant performance changes.
And so, the first step to optimization is to update PHP to the latest version. As of 2024, the latest version of Laravel is Laravel 11. It was released last March 2024, and you can read the release notes and new improvements here.
It’s best to have an experienced Laravel developer or a professional Laravel development company review your code to ensure compatibility with the latest PHP version. This can be challenging for large legacy applications, but using the latest versions offers benefits like new features, bug fixes, security patches, and performance improvements.
2. Pick a secure server for hosting
To maintain a secure hosting environment, it’s important to choose a safe server and regularly back up your website.
Use strong passwords and authorizations since your site holds sensitive information. Avoid shared servers, and ensure secure connections with SSH, FTPS, SSL, private networks, and VPNs. Consider disabling SSH password login on your Linux server for extra security.
Speaking of security, you can trust with Laravel’s built-in authentication system. It ensures your website’s information stays secure and restricts access as needed. Keep your users’ data private and protected from SQL injections by utilizing Laravel’s Eloquent ORM, which employs PDO binding to prevent SQL query vulnerabilities.
3. Learn how to cache effectively
One of Laravel’s standout features is its powerful command-line tool, Artisan. This tool allows Laravel developers to effortlessly automate tedious, repetitive tasks, making it easy to create commands and run tests.
Artisan also offers caching commands that can significantly improve your Laravel application performance. Some of the top caching commands include:
Route Caching
Caching your routes is one of the most effective ways to improve Laravel performance. By running the command:
| 1 | php artisan route:cache |
.You can cache all your application’s routes, reducing the time it takes for Laravel to find and load them.
Every request starts up the Laravel framework, which reads and parses the routes file and then formats it for use by your app.
If there are any route changes or new routes added, the developer must run this command:
| 1 | php artisan route:clear |
This command makes sure the routed cache files are cleared so the new routes work smoothly.
Config Caching
Config caching is almost similar to route caching. It reduces the time it takes to load your application’s configuration files, boosts your application’s performance, and prevents the framework from repeatedly parsing files to read configurations.
To cache the configuration files, run the command:
| 1 | php artisan config:cache |
Every time you make changes or add new configuration files, use the command below to clear the cache before running the above command.
| 1 | php artisan config:clear |
It clears the cache related to configuration and .env. There are plenty of forums online where you can find the right configuration solution for parameters not updated on the site. It’s really all about the config cache, so it’s best to only enable the necessary cache file.
Views Caching
View cache is another key part of your Laravel applications. The view caches generated by the Blade template boost your project’s speed. To manually build all views and give your project a performance boost, you can use the following artisan command:
| 1 | php artisan view:cache |
View caching in Laravel is a handy feature that stores compiled views, saving you time on retrieval and parsing. Just remember to clear the cache when you upload new code, or you’ll find yourself wasting time fixing issues from Laravel using outdated views. Each view gets its own cache file, so whenever you tweak anything in the resources/views directory, make sure to clear the cache by running:
| 1 | php artisan view:clear |
Application Caching
The application cache is the primary cache in Laravel. It stores manually-saved data in your app, enhancing performance by speeding up access to frequently-used information. By caching the results of commonly used methods, it allows for quick retrieval, resulting in a faster application.
Using tags or multiple cache storage can help you clear just specific cached components. Here’s a command to help clear the application cache:
| 1 | php artisan cache:clear |
This command will not delete the cache related to the config, route, or view cache. It is stored in the /bootstrap/cache/folder.
4. Use Laravel queues
Laravel queues are a powerful tool to help optimize your application’s performance. Queues allow you to defer time-consuming tasks in the background, freeing up resources on your web server and preventing delays in your application.
There are many ways you can set up queues in Laravel, and the best way really depends on what you need.
First off, make sure your queues are set for concurrency. This means multiple workers can handle items from the queue at the same time, which can seriously boost the website’s performance.
Next, keep an eye on your queues. This way, you can spot any performance bottlenecks or issues messing with the performance.
Lastly, remember to restart your queues gently during deployment with `php artisan queue:restart`. Queues are long-lasting processes and won’t pick up changes in your app code unless you restart them. To skip doing it manually, use a process manager like Supervisor to restart queue workers for you automatically.
Let’s take a sample of it here:
The store() method is handy for saving subscription info in the database and sending an email to a specific address; it gives you a JSON response. However, users won’t see their response on the browser immediately after sending their email. Even if it’s just a few seconds, it might be enough to turn customers away.
To fix this, let’s implement a queue to keep customers from waiting:
This code queues up the email for sending and saves the contact form data in the database. It lets you add the email to the queue and handle it once the response is sent to the user’s browser, so there’s no waiting around to send the email first.
Laravel supports a variety of queue drivers, such as IronMQ, Redis, Amazon SQS, and Beanstalkd.
5. Start using a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A content delivery network (CDN) is a system of servers distributed around the world to deliver website content to users based on their geographic location. By using a CDN, you can reduce load times and improve the overall performance of your Laravel application.
When you use a CDN, your website’s static files, such as images, CSS, and JavaScript files, are stored on different servers located closer to the user. This means that when a user requests your website, the files are loaded from the server closest to them, reducing latency and improving page load times.
To set up a CDN with your Laravel API, sign up with a CDN provider and tweak your API to send content through the CDN. Usually, this means changing the URLs for your static assets to point to the CDN’s servers instead of your own.
6. Compress your images
Another quick and easy way to improve the performance of your Laravel application is by compressing images. Large images can significantly slow down your website’s load times, so it’s important to optimize them for web use.
There are many tools available that can help you compress your images without losing quality, such as TinyPNG or JPEGmini. If you’re using Laravel Mix, it’s a good idea to add an NPM package like ImageMin when you’re compiling your images.
In addition to compressing images, you can also implement lazy loading for images on your website. This means that images will only load when they are visible on the screen, reducing the initial load time of your website and improving overall performance.
7. Debug with Laravel Debugbar
Debugging, even after web development, is essential to improve performance. That’s where Laravel Debugbar comes in.
Laravel Debugbar is a package that provides a developer toolbar to help debug and optimize your Laravel application. It gives you insights into the performance of your application, as well as detailed information on database queries, logs, and more.
It comes with a profiler enabled by default. This handy tool pinpoints the parts of your code that are slowest to run, helping you focus your optimization efforts where they matter most.
To start:
- Install the Debugbar with the command composer require barryvdh/laravel-debugbar –dev
- Publish the config file with php artisan vendor:publish –provider=”Barryvdh\Debugbar\ServiceProvider”
- Enable Debugbar in your .env file by setting APP_DEBUGBAR=true
With Laravel Debugbar, you can easily track down and eliminate performance issues in your code. It’s a powerful tool that every Laravel developer should have in their arsenal.
8. Optimize with database optimization techniques
Laravel code performs a lot of database operations, so it’s important to optimize these queries to improve performance.
Here are some techniques for database query optimization:
- Use eager loading with the “with” method instead of making multiple queries for related models.
- Take advantage of indexes in your database to speed up query execution. Indexing columns that are commonly used where clauses or joins can significantly improve performance.
- Avoid using a wildcard (%) at the beginning of LIKE queries as it forces a full table scan, slowing down the query. Instead, use % only at the end of the string.
- Use caching to store frequently accessed data and reduce database calls.
Laravel’s Eloquent ORM makes writing efficient database queries a breeze, but it’s crucial to ensure they’re optimized for your database engine. Watch out for the “eager loading” feature of Eloquent, as it can sometimes lead to inefficient queries. Lazy eager loading tends to be a better choice. Just keep an eye on the SQL queries your application runs and make sure they’re as efficient as possible.
9. Consider generating a class map with Composer
If you’re diving into a Laravel project, you’ll likely start by using Composer to install dependencies. But did you know Composer can also help manage your codebase more effectively?
By keeping your project’s code separate from the dependencies, you can optimize Composer to boost performance. This involves creating a class map, which compiles your project’s classes into a single file. This way, Composer doesn’t have to sift through tons of directories to load classes, leading to a faster, optimized Laravel app.
10. Dispose unwanted packages
Take a moment to check out the dependencies in your composer.json file. Ask yourself if you really need each package. Most of the time, the answer will be yes, but occasionally, it might be no.
You might have a package that does a lot, but you’re only using a couple of its features. So, here’s the question: “Can you code those features yourself and get rid of the package?”
If writing, updating, and maintaining the code is too much hassle, sticking with the pre-packaged solution is probably best. However, if the code is simple to handle, dropping the package could speed up your Laravel website.
Let’s Develop Your Laravel Website!
Unless you have an excellent understanding of Laravel, developing a Laravel application may be a tough task.
Startechup is a web development company in the Philippines with years of experience in providing Laravel development services. We have a team of skilled developers who can help you build fast, efficient, and scalable web applications using Laravel.
If you’re interested in developing your Laravel website or need help optimizing your existing one, contact us today!
