How to Optimize Your Laravel Application for Performance
A Quick Guide for Optimizing Laravel Web & App Performance
Learn effective techniques to optimize your Laravel app for performance in 2024. Boost UX, reduce load times, and save costs on server upgrades (from AI)
Technically, Laravel is not a slow but blazing-fast PHP framework capable of handling heavy application needs. However, many developers have poor habits that affect application performance in the long run. For instance,
Looking at these facts, we have decided to write a post on Laravel performance optimization in 2024. In this post, we will discuss mainly the Laravel app for performance or Laravel application for performance, how to speed up Laravel application, Laravel caching strategies, Laravel database optimization, and Laravel scalability tips.
What Will You Get from Laravel Performance Optimization?
It’s a tricky question: what will you get from spending time and effort on Laravel performance optimization? It has a few advantages, such as:
Enhanced UX:
Modern web users are not ready to wait a second or two for a website to load on their large or tiny devices. If your website or web application loads fast, they will feel a good user experience.
Rapid Content Delivery:
Laravel clears caches and optimizes queries. It speeds up website content delivery and considerably cuts page load time.
High ROI:
Laravel performance tips can speed up the Laravel application, saving webmasters money on frequent server upgrades.
Less Workload:
When you optimize the Laravel app for performance, you make it easy to upkeep and preemptively address potential issues, reducing internal workload.
General Tips to Speed Up Laravel Application
Before discussing technical tips, we offer some general tips on speeding up the Laravel application.
#1 – Always Upgrade the Laravel Application to the Latest PHP Version:
The PHP platform frequently releases updates with security patches, bug fixes, and updated features. So, keep your Laravel updated with the latest PHP version for various security and performance reasons. The current PHP version boasts performance features, including faster execution of requests, enums, inheritance cache, and fibers.
We can see performance improvement in each new version of PHP. The performance boost remains 9% while moving from PHP 7.2-7.3, and it has been enhanced to 15% in PHP 7.4.
Thus, the data indicates that a version upgrade is the proper policy for performance optimization in Laravel.
#2 – Always Compress Images, Audios, & Videos:
Modern web uses multimedia content, such as photos, audio, videos, and animations. Heavy multimedia content may be a performance bottleneck if it is not optimized. Therefore, Laravel offers TinyPNG, reSmush.it, and ImageMin-like image compressing tools. Similarly, you can use third-party image, audio, video, and animation compressing tools to reduce multimedia content size for better mobile and web performance.
#3 – Reduce Autoloaded Classes & Services:
By default, Laravel autoloads classes and services. You must limit unnecessary classes in the composer to reduce overhead.
Similarly, Laravel auto-loads many service providers listed in the default config/app.php file. However, many services are superfluous to your needs, such as pagination, translation, authentication, etc. You can simply disable them and enhance the application speed.
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Laravel Caching Strategies
We know the caching mechanism creates a data buffer on the server and devices often used by web or app users. So, the application never has to repeat the fetching process on each request. Thus, it saves time and overhead and enhances performance.
A recent case study by Laravel News depicted significant performance improvement by implementing Laravel’s built-in caching mechanisms. The caching has reduced response time by up to 80%.
Laravel offers a unified API for the following caching systems.
Route Caching:
It’s helpful in the app because it has many configurations and routes spread across a vast code. Route caching is a group of routes packed in a single command. It reduces manual charting of routes and enhances performance. Laravel retrieves routes periodically from the pre-compiled cache rather than repeating the process for each new user.
Configuration Caching:
It compiles all configuration values of your application into one file, making the framework fast.
Views Caching:
It consists of a cache that stores generated Blade templates to enhance application speed.
Application Caching:
It saves all the data you cache manually in your app.
Laravel Database Optimization
We at iCommuneTech optimize databases in Laravel applications in the following ways.
Database Indexing:
Fast database indexing makes fast query response possible. Laravel developers can optimize database indexing using the Artisan command, which ensures that frequently queried columns are indexed.
Eloquent Relationships:
Developers must use Eloquent relationships wisely. This is because improper usage can lead to an N+1 query issue. You can use eager loading to prevent it.
Database Query Optimization:
Avoid the use of new queries whenever possible. You can use a built-in query builder and Eloquent ORM to optimize queries in Laravel. Developers can use ‘explain’ statements to comprehend complicated queries.
Retrieve Limited Data:
If your application fetches all columns in the database, it can increase overhead. So, select only essential columns.
Laravel Scalability Tips
Web applications often grow over time. In addition to the number of users, application usage also grows, and some features and functionality need to scale up while others need to scale down. Laravel is flexible and provides enough to cope with scalability issues.
Horizontal Scaling:
You can add more servers horizontally to meet scalability requirements. This is useful for e-commerce applications that experience seasonal traffic spikes.
Use Load Balancer:
A load balancer distributes traffic across multiple servers instead of a single one. This enhances availability and reduces crashes or loading problems.
Use Master-slave Replication:
You can set up master-slave replication with your database to distribute read operations across multiple servers. It will enhance read performance and cut load on the controller server.
CDN for Static Assets:
Many static assets, such as images, CSS, and JavaScript code on the server, can increase latency and crash with overload traffic if you use CDN (Content Delivery Network) to offload them from the server.
Performance Tuning Laravel
You can fine-tune the Laravel application by implementing the following steps.
Minimize Middleware:
Middleware is helpful in several application functionalities but can add overhead. So, minimize their numbers and combine similar middleware in the groups.
Queue Management:
Several application tasks, such as sending emails, uploading files, or running background processes, are time-consuming and overhead-increasing. Laravel offers a unified API for different queue backends.
View Rendering Optimization:
Delayed or sluggish view rendering is a performance hindrance. So, avoid heavy computations in views. You can pre-process data in the controller to reduce burdens on views. Similarly, you can use a view composer to share application data across multiple views to gain good speed.
Use Laravel Mix:
Laravel Mix can compile and minify CSS and JavaScript code in the backend. Thus, it can reduce the number of requests and the size of assets loaded by the browser.
Continuous Monitoring & Profiling
Laravel performance optimization is an ongoing process. Developers should use monitoring and profiling tools to monitor it continuously.
Monitoring Tools:
You can use monitoring tools, including New Relic, Blackfire, or Laravel Telescope, to obtain insights into slow queries, memory usage, and other obstacles in your application.
Profiling Tools:
Laravel Debugbar is an ideal tool for profiling and debugging Laravel applications. It recognizes the slow parts of your Laravel application and helps you solve them.
Laravel Performance Tips for Code Optimization
Unoptimized content and code are known performance bottlenecks. We have seen content optimization, and now we will look at code optimization tips for your Laravel application development.
Lazy Loading:
The lazy loading technique loads data only when it is needed. Thus, it dramatically decreases initial load time and boosts the Laravel application’s overall performance. Laravel supports lazy loading.
Unnecessary Calculations:
Developers can optimize loops, minimize conditional statements, and reduce redundant operations to avoid unnecessary calculations within the application.
Effective Data Structure:
Developers can use arrays instead of collections for simple data manipulation. Thus, using an effective data structure can improve the application’s performance.
Multiple Level Caching:
Developers have enough room to implement caching at multiple levels, such as route caching, view caching, and caching at the entire HTTP response, when appropriate.
Wrapping It Up:
Every client wants to run their Laravel application smoothly, manage increasing load time efficiently, and deliver superior user experience. However, this is only possible with proper Laravel performance optimization. At iCommuneTech, we have an experienced and expert Laravel designer, programmers, and a DevOps team.
We can implement Laravel performance tips at different levels, such as:
We can manage your performance optimization by implementing various tips, tricks, and strategies. You can call our team to learn more and get a free quote for your next project.
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Here’s an another article that might interest you: 10+ Expert Tips & Tricks for Laravel Development in 2024.