Here’s how to improve the performance of Laravel applications
The performance of an application is important to the user experience and plays a determining role in whether users continue to use the application. This is true for Laravel applications, as it is for many other frameworks. After all, no one is waiting for slow load times. If an application takes longer than one second to respond, you risk losing up to half of your potential users. A response time of around 200 milliseconds is often considered ideal for an optimal user experience, although in practice this is not always easy to achieve. In this blog, we will show you how to improve the performance of your Laravel application. Using practical examples and concrete tips, we will help you make your application faster and more efficient.
Symptoms of poor performance
When an application is slow, users notice it immediately. Pages hang or don’t load at all. What is less visible, but just as annoying, are processes that crash behind the scenes. Think of delays in sending e-mails or notifications. A system that sends a password reset but does not do so until hours later clearly shows that something is not working properly. Such signals often point to performance problems in the underlying code or infrastructure.
Bottlenecks in growing projects
In projects that start small and grow later, bottlenecks often arise when performance is not properly accounted for in the early stages. Especially in SMEs or semi-government, where budget and planning are often leading, performance is sometimes not taken seriously until things go wrong. This leads to expensive solutions such as scaling up servers or adding extra memory. While many of these problems can be avoided by taking scalability and efficiency into account already during development. If performance is considered from the very first lines of code, you lay a solid foundation for the future.
Two methods to make Laravel faster
There are several ways to improve the speed of Laravel applications. The two main methods are discussed below:
Caching
A common technique for making Laravel faster is caching. With this method, a page is temporarily stored in the form as it looked when someone visited it. This avoids unnecessary recalculations with each visit. Still, caching is not always appropriate, for example when you always want to display real-time data.
Database optimization
Another common optimization is in the database. When you search a large dataset without the proper fields configured, results take an unnecessarily long time to retrieve. By adding indices to important fields, you can drastically speed up searches. Such optimizations fall under database tuning and often require specific knowledge, for example from a DevOps specialist. But developers can also gain a lot here, for example by handling data loading smarter and by ensuring that queries are built efficiently.
Measure performance with convenient monitoring tools
To gain insight into which parts of an application are slow, monitoring is essential. Tools such as Sentry provide real-time capabilities to see where the slowdown is. Not only does it show which pages are slow, it also shows changes in speed over time. This allows you to see immediately if an update has had a negative effect. Even when scaling an application, say from ten thousand to a million users, a tool like Sentry provides valuable insights into how performance changes and where bottlenecks occur.
Besides Sentry, by the way, there are a number of other alternatives, such as New Relic and Odir. These tools measure how fast pages load and provide notifications when deviations occur. That way, you always stay one step ahead of potential problems and ensure that your application continues to perform, even as the load increases.
Starting with optimization
Optimization begins with analysis. There is no set order that you can always follow. It is often a combination of experience, knowledge and measurement results that determines where to start. By looking at both the code and the hardware used, a complete picture emerges of where the bottlenecks are. From there, you can make targeted improvements. Sometimes the cause lies in a piece of inefficient code, sometimes in the way data is stored or retrieved. Each project requires customization and a solution that fits the specific use.
Sustainable optimization of Laravel applications
In theory, a well-optimized application should continue to perform in the future. In practice, however, some applications still encounter limits in the long run. An example is an application that worked fine at one million messages, but crashed at ten million because MySQL was having trouble with the search functionality. It took some time before it became clear that the database structure was the problem. This is precisely why it is important to keep a constant focus on scalability. Tools like Sentry help with that by giving early signals when a system is reaching its limit, so you can make adjustments before real problems arise.
Quick wins with every installation
Laravel provides built-in warnings for situations in which unnecessarily many queries are executed. For example, the framework recognizes the N+1 problem, where fetching related data unnecessarily runs an additional query per item. By spotting this early on, you avoid performance problems on a larger scale. In addition, it is wise to use larger data sets during testing, such as through seeders, to see how the application holds up under realistic use.
The usefulness of a database specialist
What is often overlooked is the role of a database specialist. In previous projects, it was found that whereas developers often look directly in the code for causes of delay, a specialist can see at a glance in the database where the delay is coming from. Such a person can pinpoint the root of the problem with a single analysis, after which a solution is often found quickly.
We are ready for you
The performance of Laravel applications can be improved through targeted optimizations, such as deploying caching, adding database indexes and applying asynchronous task processing. This can often lead to complicated configurations and additional maintenance. Fortunately, we can help you with this, so your application is blazing fast and users don’t drop out. Request a free consultation today to see what we can do for your business.