Laravel was founded in 2011 but recently has become a popular option for developing such applications which are exclusively for business purposes. The performance optimization factor of Laravel makes it more acceptable by the developers and the programmers. Laravel development company provides complete guidance on why the business should focus on optimization of the Laravel performance. It is very important to ensure the performance of the Laravel application and every developer should make sure to deliver it to their clients. Many companies exclusively hire a developer in order to get the desired performance from the Laravel application.
HOW IMPORTANT IS THE PERFORMANCE?
If we ask the end-users, then they definitely prefer the applications which load quickly rather than being slow. As per the study, almost 53% of mobile users usually leave the website if it does not get loaded in the next 3 seconds, as they lose interest and switch to another website. The average time taken by any website to load is 12 seconds. But this is how the overall performance of the website is measured. With every increasing second for the website to get loaded, the user loses their interest and moves on to another alternate website that loads faster. This is why it is a must to ensure the performance of the websites developed on Laravel.
Now there are certain tricks that one can follow religiously to ensure the performance of the Laravel websites. Let’s look into them deeply.
THE CHECKLIST FOR THE PERFORMING LARAVEL APPLICATIONS:
- Use Composers to Optimize Autoload
The composers can definitely be used as it helps to scan the application and develop one on one association with all the classes and the files in the application. Usually, developers put all the dependencies in the production, but this is the wrong approach. Ignition like development packages records your queries, logs, etc. although are very helpful in development but slow down the performance. So, the developers need to make sure that they use the –no-dev flag while installing packages using Composer.
Additionally, also use the `-o’ flag in production and this enables Composer to optimize the autoloader by generating a “class-map”. The developers need to make sure that they go through the Composer documentation on the autoloader optimization strategies.
- Maximize the Use of in-built Performance Quick Wins
Laravel offers several quick wins which can be applied to any app. And Route caching is considered to be one of the important performance quick wins. It also offers Artisan Cache Config which ultimately helps in boosting the performance. Routes caching is an important feature of optimization, particularly for apps with too many routes and configurations. The routes cache is just a simple array that helps in speeding up the performance of Laravel because of the faster loading of the array. Run the following command to ensure the performance:
php artisan route:cache
Every time the route file or cache changes, remember to run the command or else Laravel will load the old changes from the cache memory. There are several other caching also as offered by Laravel like View Caching, Event Caching, Configuration Caching.
- Choose the Correct Performance Drivers
Making a selection of the right cache, queues, or session drivers makes very drastic changes and optimizes the performance. Built-in memory cache drivers like DynamoDB, Memcached, Redis helps in caching the production. Redis, Beanstalkd, SQS are the drivers recommended for queuing. And for sessions, Database, Redis, Memcached, or DynamoDB drivers are considered as best.
- Get Rid of Unused Service
It is suggested not to load all the services at once through the config. One should always disable the unused services in the config files, and this will surely help in boosting up the performance in the context of Laravel.
- Limit the Inclusion of Libraries
One of the major benefits of Laravel is that it is supported by a huge library that can be easily included in the applications based on Laravel. If you hire a developers who thinks that the functionalities as required can be added without including the libraries, then they can just remove it from the config/app.php. This will ultimately increase the performance of the Laravel application.
- Time Taking Tasks Should be Queued
There are certain tasks that take a longer time to complete and then perform during a web request. And Laravel on the contrary offers the best queuing system which helps to align the time-consuming tasks to the queued jobs so that the Laravel based application can answer the respective queries with the utmost speed. Examples of some of the time-taking tasks are sending the notifications to the users, regular interaction with third-party APIs, storage of the CSV file, queries of the expensive database, or keeping the search index updated.
- Enable the Compression Headers
Setting compression headers on text format files can definitely improve Laravel performance. Developers or programmers need to ensure that the compression headers are enabled on the web server or CDN for text format files like XML, JSON, JS, and others. Image formats are not required to be compressed as they are already compressed and are not in text format files. And if you want to achieve a high level of performance, they must set up the brotli or gzip at the CDN level or web server. The overall compression will definitely boost the Laravel performance.
- Choose the Session Driver and Fast Cache
To get the best and optimal Laravel performance, the preferred and the best route is to store the session and cache sections in the RAM. Memcached can be used for the best Laravel performance through a selection of fast cache and session driver.
- Cache the Result of Queries
By caching the result of queries which regularly run in a great manner to improvise the performance of Laravel 5.5. So, the developers can always use the below function:
$posts = Cache::remember(‘index.posts’, 30, function()
{return Post::with(‘comments’, ‘tags’, ‘author’, ‘seo’)->whereHidden(0)->get();});
- Deal With Data Using “Eager Loading”
Eloquent is considered one of the great ORM to deal with databases. I create such models which abstract the database tables from the developers. Eloquent helps to deal with all sorts of CRUD operations in PHP. Eloquent retrieves all the related objects as a response to the initial query. Now, let’s see the difference between the lazy loading query and eager loading query:
Query of Lazy loading looks like this:
$books = App\Book::all();
foreach ($books as $book) {
echo $book->author->name;}
And query for eager loading looks like this:
$books = App\Book::with(‘author’)->get();
foreach ($books as $book) {
echo $book->author->name;
- Static Assets Should be Cached Regularly
Regular caching provides a great boost to the overall performance of the application. And especially when you cache the images, CSS, JS files, it affects the performance in a positive way. Hence, it is always recommended to enable the cache-control header at the CDN level or at your web server. This makes sure that the browsers do not request static assets during your regular visit to the website. Laravel also offers an option of cache-busting which should definitely be used.
- Pre-compilation of the Assets
Usually, the developers distribute their code into separate files for tuning their Laravel application. Although it contributes to clean management of the codes it does not affect the efficiency or performance of the application. So, developers can use the below command to get help:
php artisan optimize
php artisan config:cache
php artisan route:cache
- Bundling the Assets
Laravel applications are by default accompanied by the Laravel Mix. Now, what is the role of Laravel Mix, it provides an effective API that defines the Webpack build specifically for your applications. Laravel Mix also compiles the application assets like styles, scripts, and others. And with this several stylesheets into a single sheet. This can be done by using the below command:
mix.styles([
‘public/css/vendor/normalize.css’,
‘public/css/styles.css’
], ‘public/css/all.css’);
- Use CDN to Serve the Assets
CDN basically stands for Content Delivery Networks are a group of servers that is geographically distributed and serves the content which is closer to the applications visitor using the nearest server. This ultimately increases the speed of Laravel applications, and the end-users experience a faster loading page. CDNs also serve other benefits like DDoS protection, decreased load on the web server, and analytics on the served assets. CDNs are usually free to a certain extent of usage, and AWS Cloudfront, Azure CDN, Cloudflare are some of the known CDNs. So CDNs should definitely be used by the developers and the programmers in order to increase the performance of Laravel applications.
- Caching Wisely
Laravel has in-built caching support that is best to use for heavy workloads. Caching can be used in different ways like Caching of the static pages, Partial or fragment caching, caching queries, and many more. But Caching should be used very carefully while retrieving the data. The developers need to make sure that every time there is a change in cached content, invalidate or refresh your cache in order to get the optimum performance of the application based on Laravel.
CONCLUSION:
Performance is the ultimate goal of everything be it an application or website or any kind of service. Hence, by following the above steps, the developers can make sure that the Laravel based applications works really well as well as are fast.
