If you are in the web application development industry, Laravel is your savior. It is the most preferred and extensively used PHP web development framework. In accordance with Google trends, Laravel has maintained its position as the most used and popular PHP framework over the last few years. To build scalable, robust, and high-performing applications, you must vouch for Laravel and hire Laravel developers.
Despite having devised exceptional and well-designed Laravel applications, performance bottlenecks are bound to happen. Several reasons can hamper the application speed, user experience, and overall efficiency. Read this blog to learn some of the most common performance obstacles and how to address them for optimized performance.
Common Performance Bottlenecks in Laravel Development
Web application development is a vertical that is bound to have performance issues either during the development phase or post-maintenance phase. You can’t completely eradicate the hindrances, but you can sidestep them if you are familiar with the common ones. So, let’s look at them and the ways to address them:
Database Queries
Slow database queries are a primary and often faced performance challenge in Laravel web app development. If your queries are poorly optimized, it can impede the entire application, making it challenging to scale.
The best way to address this issue is to use tools like Laravel Debugbar or database query profiling to identify slow queries and resolve them using indexes, caching, optimized database schema, etc.
Resource-intensive operations
Does the Laravel application that you developed utilize file uploads, image processing, or long-running tasks? If yes, these are resource-intensive operations that can result in performance bottlenecks.
This can be resolved by employing tools like Laravel Horizon or queuing that will offload these tasks to a separate process or worker. This will leave more room for your applications to continue processing requests.
Poorly written code
The quality of the code holds a pivotal significance in the performance of your application. If your application code is poorly structured or consists of a large number of database queries, loops, or redundant conditionals, it can adversely impact the application’s performance.
You can optimize your code by using techniques such as code profiling, refactoring, and reducing the number of database queries.
Lack of caching
Cache is a prerequisite to ensure agile and flawless application performance. If your application is missing proper caching, it can delay your load time and hinder the overall performance.
If you want to foster application speed and make it efficacious, you must take advantage of caching techniques such as file caching, database caching, in-memory caching, etc.
Configuration
Server configuration is yet another aspect that can impact your application performance. If your server is not configured correctly, it can result in slow response time or server errors.
To address this becomes an inevitable requirement, and an ideal way to do this is by incorporating techniques like caching, load balancing, optimizing server settings like memory allocation and timeouts, etc.
In order to improve the performance and scalability of Laravel applications and render a seamless user experience, you must be acquainted with the top performance optimization tips. Look no further and hop onto the subsequent piece of content for top-rated tips.
Best Practices for Laravel Performance Optimization
You need to keep a performance checklist ready if you want to identify and address your application bottlenecks. How do you recognize if it’s a performance bottleneck? Some standard indications are high loading times, high memory usage, etc.
If you are reading this blog post, it’s sensible to think you are looking for assistance to overcome performance challenges and enhance your application to leverage profitable returns. If it takes more than 3 seconds to load a mobile webpage, 53% of the users tend to leave the site. You can’t afford to lose a significant portion of your prospective audience; hence, you must be mindful of adopting the best performance optimization tactics. Some of these are:
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
This tip can work wonders if you want a minimal response time with maximal load speed for your application. All you need to do is cache the content and deliver it from the server closest to the user. This can result in effective performance of Laravel applications and is particularly useful for large files such as images or JavaScript libraries. For instance, if you are accessing a website from India, the load speed will be faster from a CDN server in India rather than a US server.
Employ a deployment tool to appeal to all the commands
Anything that helps you reduce the page load time is worthwhile, and hence this might not be a tip but will still add value. A deployer is a deployment tool that can be deployed to the Laravel application as its seeds, optimizations, and migrations with one command.
Leverage JIT Compiler
As PHP is a computer language, it can’t comprehend PHP code natively. Therefore, most programmers compile the code into bytecode and interpret it. This program compilation procedure significantly affects the Laravel application performance and user experience. Therefore, programmers use Zend Engine so that the code can be compiled quickly all at once with its just-in-time compiler.
Compress Images
A lot of images in your Laravel application development can also impact the page load speed. Thus, you must compress all of them to optimise the performance. Each image will require a different tool to maintain the resolution and quality of images.
Bonus Tip: If you’re using Laravel Mix, you should use an NPM package like ImageMin for compilation. If you have a very large image, use TinyPNG to compress it first and then ImageMin to compress it further.
Classmap Optimization
One of the most effective ways to keep your appcompat and ready for faster loading is to keep all files inclusively together. Since an application incorporates multiple files, you can include several files into a combined file, making it easier for you to call and have one standard file.
Assets Bundling
Laravel applications are all accompanied by the instrumental Laravel Mix, which builds your application API from Webpack. Laravel Mix comprises standard CSS and Javascript preprocessors that provide script, style, and other compilations.
Laravel Mix will auto-create an all .CSS file from normalize.css and style.css. This offers you the comfort of combining both style sheets into a single .css file instead of retrieving them individually.
Install a Profiler Package – Laravel Debugbar
The Laravel Debugbar package can help you identify performance bottlenecks quickly. The package consists of ways to log SQL queries, view information about the request, responses, and more.
Concluding Remarks
A highly optimised app is very crucial in the existing digital landscape. You must undertake a Laravel performance monitoring analysis and recognize your tips and tricks that yield you exceptional app optimization. This will help you foster the user experience with an agile page load. Ensure that the team of Laravel developers you hire has expertise in this facet of web app development.