How to Make Your Laravel Web Apps Faster

July 14, 2023 8:28 am by Sumit Gour

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Laravel is a great PHP framework for web development. It has many features and benefits for web developers. But, sometimes, Laravel web apps can be slow if you don’t optimize them well. In this blog post, we will show you some tips and tricks on how to make your Laravel web apps faster and more responsive.

Why You Need to Make Your Laravel Web Apps Faster
Making your Laravel web apps faster is important for many reasons. For example, faster web apps can:

• Make your users happy and loyal
• Improve your SEO ranking and traffic
• Increase your sales and conversions
• Save your server costs and resources

Therefore, you need to make your Laravel web apps faster and give your users the best experience possible.

How to Measure Your Laravel Web App Speed
Before you start making your Laravel web app faster, you need to measure how fast it is now and find out what is slowing it down. There are many tools and methods that you can use to measure your Laravel web app speed, such as:

• Laravel Debug Bar: This is a tool that adds a bar to your web app, where you can see information about queries, routes, sessions, views, cache, etc. It can help you find any errors or problems in your code and database.
• Laravel Telescope: This is another tool that gives you a dashboard for your web app, where you can see information about requests, exceptions, logs, jobs, events, mails, notifications, cache operations, queries, models, etc. It can help you monitor your web app performance and find any issues or anomalies.
• Laravel Page Speed: This is another tool that makes your web app output smaller and faster by using techniques such as minification, compression, caching, etc. It can help you reduce your web page size and improve its loading speed.
• Web Performance Tools: These are tools that measure your web app speed from different locations and devices. They can give you metrics such as page load time, time to first byte (TTFB), speed index, first contentful paint (FCP), largest contentful paint (LCP), cumulative layout shift (CLS), etc. Some examples of these tools are Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, WebPageTest, etc.

How to Make Your Laravel Web App Faster
There are many ways to make your Laravel web app faster depending on your web app type and complexity. However, some of the most common and effective ways are:

• Route Caching: Route caching is a way to store all your routes in one file and reduce the time to load them from many files. This can make your web app faster especially if you have many routes. To use route caching, you can run the php artisan route:cache command.
• Config Caching: Config caching is a way to store all your config files in one file and reduce the time to load them from many files. This can also make your web app faster especially if you have many config files. To use config caching, you can run the PHP artisan config: cache command.
• View Caching: View caching is a way to store the compiled views of your web app and reduce the time to compile them every time they are requested. This can also make your web app faster especially if you have complex views with many components or directives. To use view caching, you can run the PHP artisan view: cache command.
• Autoloader Optimization: Autoloader optimization is a way to optimize the Composer autoloader by making a map of all the classes used by your web app. This can make your web app faster by reducing the number of files that need to be checked by the autoloader. To use autoloader optimization, you can run the composer dump-autoload –optimize command.
• Database Optimization: Database optimization is a way to improve the speed and efficiency of your database interactions by using techniques such as indexing, caching, eager loading, chunking, etc. These techniques can help you reduce the number of queries made by your web app and make them faster. For more details on how to optimize your database in Laravel, you can read this article: Ultimate Laravel Performance Optimization Guide.
• PHP Version Upgrade: PHP version upgrade is a way to update your PHP version to the latest one that supports Laravel. This can make your web app faster by using the new features and improvements of PHP such as JIT compiler, preloading, etc. For example, PHP 8.1 runs 20.65% faster on Symfony 6.0, which is a part of Laravel 9.0. To upgrade your PHP version, you can use the Cloudways platform that offers easy and flexible PHP version management.

Server Optimization: Server optimization is a way to improve the speed and security of your web server by using techniques such as caching, compression, SSL, CDN, etc. These techniques can help you reduce the bandwidth and latency of your web app and make it more available and reliable. For example, Cloudways offers a ready-to-go cloud hosting platform that provides optimized servers with SSD storage, custom performance stack, free SSL certificates, built-in CDN, etc.

Conclusion
Laravel is a fast and feature-rich framework that can help you build amazing web apps. However, to make sure your web apps are fast and smooth, you need to use some optimization techniques and best practices. In this blog post, we have shared some of the best ways to make your Laravel web apps faster and more responsive. We hope you find this guide useful and helpful for your Laravel projects.