Ronak Patel

It was in 2011 that Laravel was launched in the digital marketplace. Since then, it has been considered one of the most popular options for building business applications. Laravel has been used to build a wide range of applications like eCommerce business platforms to information management systems. It has been used to take care of most of the common tasks in development in an easy manner like the routing, authentication, caching and sessions. 152,419 is the total number of live websites built on Laravel in the market. 0.34% is the Market Share of Laravel among all websites in the market. Something that makes Laravel all the more favorite of the business people and developers equally is the Laravel performance optimization. This helps them to easily fine-tune the application or website from the aspect of performance. Importance of Website Speed Now you may be having a thought like why is it so important to concentrate on the speed of the website!What kind of difference a fraction of second can make in here? Let us tell you that it can make a huge difference! As per a study it is said that around half of the people don’t wait on a website if it takes more than 2 seconds to load. How your business will look like to others, user experience, conversions, search rankings, and everything else depends on the speed of your website. So if your website remains slow for a long period of time then you will start seeing the decrease in the number of visitors on your site.Gradually they will all stop coming in. You need to understand that even Google is not interested in a website that takes more than 2 seconds to load and so reduce the number of crawlers that it sends to your site. 1-second delay in mobile load times can impact conversion rates by up to 20%. 53% of people will leave a mobile page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. 49% of consumers expect a page to load in two seconds or less Akamai’s 2015 Performance Matters . 4+ seconds delay in loading saw 3/4 of their web users never returning back to the site. – Akamai How to test Laravel Website Performance? Suppose you have come up with a website which is feature-rich, attractive and properly functioning, you will not be able to get the best out of it if it does not load fast. This means it will fail to address the core purpose for which it was developed in the first place. So when you plan to build your Laravel application, you need to be sure it loads fast and it can be only known when you check its speed. Laravel developers make use of performance testing tools like Pingdom to measure the loading speed of the site. In most of the cases, the developers give more importance to UI and UX of the website and page load speed takes the back seat. However, page load speed is very crucial when it comes to reducing the bouncing rate and boosting SEO rankings. This means it is important that you check the speed of your website as well as carry out regular check-ups to keep it optimized using such tools. There are many website performance testing tool from which you can choose according to your preference. Some of them are Pingdom GTmetrix Google PageSpeed Insights WebPageTest Varvy Uptrends Laravel Performance Optimization How to Improve Performance of your Laravel Website We have already seen how important it is to keep on improving the performance of your Laravel website. To make this happen you need to follow some steps and they have been explained below: Use the latest version of PHP When you make use of the latest version of PHP in your project you will be able to see improvements in the project in terms of performance. So it is recommended that you follow the latest version of PHP for your Laravel applications. Use Packages Wisely There are 203,108 repository results seen on Github when you search for Laravel. GitHub, as well as other code hosting services, offers a number of Laravel packages to be used. You get to add in some additional functionality to your Laravel site when you make use of such Laravel packages. So your application will perform better when you make use of a controlled number of packages in your application. Limit plugin usage Making use of too many plugins for different features and functionalities is one of those solid reasons that lead your website to have a very slow speed. For your Laravel development, you can find a large number of plugins available. Such plugins come with a large number of files and libraries which takes up more amount of time for loading. So to improve Laravel Performance Optimization while development, it is very important that you get rid of plugins that are not necessary in the project. Use Eager Loading In order to carry out CRUD (create, retrieve, update, delete) operations in an easy manner, Laravel makes use of Eloquent ERM. This helps to easily map the object models with the tables in the database which supports it and thus properly takes care of the database interaction. Now the issue with Eloquent is that for the data retrieval it makes use of a lazy loading approach which asks for a reference in the code and special query for the action. Now, this can result in the creation of a large number of queries and slows down the performance. It is more easy and convenient to make use of eager loading approach. When you plan ahead to build queries for the eager loading, you will able to retrieve the object models which are associated at any point of time. Configure Caching It is possible to cache all your configuration files in here. In order to combine all the configuration options into a single file for your application, here we make use of Artisan config:cache command. The framework will load this command quickly. You should use this command only during the time of project deployment. As during the application development, the configuration options will keep on changing.You should not be using this command when you are running the project during local development. Use CDN for Static files You will be able to improve the performance of your Laravel application when you load static assets files using the CDN server. Whenever a user visits a website or opens an application, a part of the information is served to the user from the CDN. This way the page load speed will increase significantly and users will have a better experience. In order to make this happen, you will have to characterize the static resources which are present on the said application. You can find the list of TOP CDN and compare its Performance from CDNPerf. Profile Queries During the Laravel development, one thing we want to regularly check is the performance of your application. For the same reason, it is important you should check on different queries and see how they are working. Once you know that you can look into the areas which need to be optimized. In order to know which of the queries are invoked, you can make use of the profiler packages like Debugar and then run them on each page. Using JIT Compilers It is not possible for the computers to understand PHP in a native manner. It is not possible for you to have PHP run by machines once you compile it to bytecode. For the same reason, we make use of the Zend engine kind of middleman for the work. Zend engine interprets the PHP files you have and then accordingly executes C routines. Now, this is a very slow process. This means every time a PHP file is run by the server, it along with the AST parser needs to convert it into tokens and then interpret it. Even if it gets the same result in the end, it needs to compile it each and every time. In order to make the application run fast, you need to compile it just once and then run it every time. You can make this happen when you make use of a JIT compiler. The JIT compiler named HHVM can be used for your Laravel web app development project. Check out our Article : [10 Reasons to Upkeep] – Why website update is important for business? Optimize your Database Optimizing the database in Laravel help you remove any unnecessary temporary files which are present in there. You can also clear out the cache and the old backups which are saved in there. This will lighten the database and increase Laravel Website speed & performance. For profiling Database query, you can use Laravel Debugger that coordinate nonexclusive PHP troubleshoot bar package. Once installed into your application you will have a decent toolbar on the base of each rendered perspectives. This toolbar will indicate you SQL inquiries that are utilized by the given page and measure of memory they are expending. Database Optimization This is a great package which empowers you to have an in-depth look at your memory consumption. Using Artisan Commands Artisan command is a very useful tool that comes with Laravel and it is used by developers to enhance the performance of the website. Especially in the case where the Laravel developer is trying to come up with a large number of configuration and routes, this can simply prove to be useful. This way the developer will only be creating cache which is in the form of a plain array and so instead of Laravel loading the real object, it will quickly load cache. You need to be sure that once you change the route files or config, you should re-run this command. If you fail to do so then Laravel will not handle the changes that you have made as it has loaded them from the cache. Also cache the user data, locations, and settings as it can reduce the number of SQL queries. Once the data changes, you should invalidate the cache. Moreover, make it a point that your database has good indexes. You also need to have your Forge deploy script have commands as well as cache your routes, views and configs. Use HTTP2 with SSL For your Laravel application and web development, it is important that you secure it first. This is where you need to make use of HTTP2 along with SSL. When it comes to securing the website on the internet, an SSL certificate is considered as the best solution. This protects your website in a way that it will not get breached over the internet while it gets opened across different computers. Again, if your website deals with sensitive information then it will not be advisable to use HTTP protocol and it is unsafe to move data and information. This is where it is recommended that you make use of HTTPS protocol for your website. This will keep the website safe from any kind of malicious attack which can compromise the sensitive information which is placed in there. So keep in mind that you make use of Laravel https redirect in your web application. Laravel Website Security Optimize images It can happen that images can come with data that is of no use for the website or application and you can optimize them. In order to optimize the images, you can make use of JPEGOptim and OptiPNG named packages. Minify CSS/JS It is possible to minify the JS and CSS files in your Laravel using tools like Elixir. It is possible to get it done manually too if you don’t wish to use any tools. Use New Relic New Relic is a service that is used to monitor the website or application that you or your team has designed and developed. This tool or service will let you know to make sure everything is running here as expected. By using this tool you can manage the performance of your application, analyze the data that talks about customer experience, identify and troubleshoot issues and get alert on issues before they affect the users. Laravel Development Services Wrapping it up It is important for Laravel development to keep on improving the performance of the Laravel application throughout the development process.When you keep on optimizing the performance of your Laravel site you will be able to offer a better experience to the users as well as build applications that are search engine friendly.