Performance Optimization Tips For Laravel Developers

Laravel is preferred more by web developers over the other available PHP frameworks. The expressive and easy syntax of Laravel makes it pretty easy for the developers to write high-quality and well-organised custom codes for web application development. Also, this PHP framework accelerates web app development by simplifying tasks like routing, session management, authentication, unit testing, and file system management. A Laravel developer can also further curtail web app development by leveraging some of the amazing features of the framework like object-oriented libraries, blade template engine, queuing services, ORM system, artisan command-line interface and more.

The framework has also been consistently evolving to meet the new emerging trends and technologies. For instance, Laravel’s latest version comes with a finely designed and revamped directory structure that simplifies features like route caching, method injection, and also natively supports multiple systems.

But just availing these Laravel features is not enough to build a fast and high-performing web application with the framework. Developers need to know and use some performance and optimisations tips and tricks as well while building a Laravel web application.

Here are some of the useful optimisation and performance tips for Laravel developers.

Switch from ‘Lazy loading’ to ‘Eager loading’:

The Eloquent ORM or Object Relational mapping makes it simpler for the developers to easily work with several databases at the same time, perform CRUD that is created, retrieve, update, and delete actions, and map the object models to the database tables. However, ORM performs all the database tasks based on the ‘Lazy loading’ approach. This means it doesn’t retrieve data until the data is not explicitly referenced in the codes. This ‘Lazy loading’ approach slows down the site or app performance by executing additional database queries. And this is why the Laravel developers must switch to ‘Eager Loading’ from the ‘Lazy loading’ approach. This Eager loading approach helps to retrieve all data with the related object models at the time of initially executing the queries itself. And this helps the web applications deliver the required data to the clients much faster and quicker without executing any additional queries.

Compress Response Data:

While using the API-based frameworks, web developers improve the loading speed of the websites or web apps by compressing response data. The developers can take advantage of the ORM for retrieving the data that has to be displayed to the end-users via a single query. Also, the developers can speed up the web apps or websites by compressing the fetched data through the view models that can create multiple subsets of the retrieved data models.

Use the JIT Compiler for Laravel:

Laravel developers can speed up the websites or web applications and can enhance their performance by using open-source virtual machines like HHVM. The HHVM uses the JIT Compiler for quickly executing the programs or codes written in PHP and for improving the performance and speed of the applications or websites significantly.

Run Artisan optimisation commands:

The latest version of Laravel enables the developers to improve the site or app performance and speed by easily running a set of command lines. Developers can run the command lines to optimise the storage path, compile the view files, create a route cache file, combine all configurations into one single file, and compile the commonly-used classes into one file.