Over the years, Laravel, an open-source PHP framework, has gained much popularity – much more so than any other framework.
Laravel stands out for a number of reasons, including its strong security, coding architecture, as well as its ability to let developers make minor changes for website optimization as well as to create business-focused applications and eCommerce platforms.
There isn’t a single web developer who hasn’t heard of or used Laravel.
This blog’s sole objective is to share all of the tricks and tips for optimizing Laravel’s performance for your Laravel web application. Let’s get right into this blog without any further ado.
Let’s first check our Google trend for Laravel in comparison to the other top 5 PHP frameworks in the past 12 months in the USA.
Source – Google Trends
You notice the fame Laravel has achieved in just 12 months. This framework has some phenomenal functionalities that once learned can make your application get the maximum potential.
Laravel has simplified the lives of developers by allowing you to optimize your application whenever you feel the need to improve its performance.
Why focus on optimizing Laravel performance?
There is always room for improvement, even if you have created an amazing Laravel application. Optimizing your Laravel app will undoubtedly accelerate the development of your business prospects.
1. Increased Commercial Growth
Your chances of connecting with a large audience are increased by improved Laravel performance, which results in a more effective website or application.
2. More Efficient Environment for Development
An optimized Laravel app can help developers spend less time coding, complete tasks more quickly, and use fewer resources.
3. Better Traffic Management
Your site can manage request counts as it grows and experiences significant traffic spikes with the help of the Laravel queue system.
Let’s examine how to improve Laravel’s performance.
Importance Of Website Speed
Did you Know a Website’s Speed has a direct impact on user experience (UX) and conversion rates? But what factors make your website load as quickly as possible?
You probably know, don’t you?
If you have your own business, you would know nothing can impact your conversion rate more than a page load time can.
According to a study by Akamai, if your website takes longer than three seconds to load, you will lose more than 79% of your potential customers. Therefore, if you want to stay ahead, you need a website that loads quickly—between 1 and 2 seconds—that users enjoy.
Many factors make website speed important, including:
- Users are more likely to prefer the other websites if your website takes too long to load, and vice versa, as it directly affects the user experience.
- Your website’s loading speed can also have an impact on your SEO ranking, which means that if a user searches for something, a quicker-loading web page will eventually come up first and you’ll end up ranking lower, which also has an impact on website traffic.
- Your conversion rate is somehow getting affected by the speed of your website. Users will probably leave your website before they have a chance to convert if they have to wait too long for it to load.
- Lastly, Websites that load quickly have higher levels of stability and lower bounce rates. Together, these elements make website speed a crucial metric to monitor.
As a result, you ought to spend some time implementing efficient website performance optimization techniques and taking laravel speed test.
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How Can You Ensure Your Laravel Website Is Secure?
Choosing Laravel over any other PHP framework, has numerous benefits. Let’s start by taking a look at a few of the Laravel Security Checklist.
1. Select a Secure Hosting Server
Use strong passwords, and consider creating regular backups of your website that you can restore in the event of a security breach or attack. To restrict access to these areas, make use of Laravel’s built-in authentication and authorization features.
Sensitive information on your website needs to be protected. So, refrain from using shared servers.
You should confirm that the provider uses the SSH protocol and authentication, FTPS, SSL, private networks, and VPNs in addition to having a secure connection before selecting your internet server.
2. Update Your Website with the Latest Versions
Verify that you are using the most recent Laravel version and that you are staying current with all of its regular updates and security patches that are released to fix any vulnerabilities. If not, you might not have the necessary Laravel website options.
3. Update Modules, Packages, and Plugins
Just upgrading your Laravel version won’t be enough. You even need to stay up-to-date with the latest laravel speed optimization package, modules, and plugins. This ensures the security of your Laravel website.
4. Check Firewall Settings
It’s important to check that your firewall settings are configured correctly and that only the necessary ports are open. It’s also important to ensure that your Laravel website is protected from unauthorized access and hacking attempts and your firewall is configured to block all incoming traffic from IP addresses that are not authorized to access your server.
You can check your firewall settings by accessing the firewall configuration on your server. You can use the command “iptables -L” to view the current firewall rules on your server.
This will give you an overview of the current rules that are in place, including the ports that are open, the IP addresses that are allowed to access your server, and any other rules that have been configured.
Consider using a firewall, such as Cloudflare, to protect your website.
5. Make Use of HTTPS
Making use of HTTPS is an important step in ensuring the security of your Laravel website, as using HTTP can transfer all your website info in plain text that is accountable to hackers and attacks.
. HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) being a protocol that provides secure communication between a web server and a web browser by encrypting the data sent between them requires a SSL certificate on your web server. SSL encryption on your website ensures that sensitive data is protected.
You can also use Laravel’s built-in middleware to redirect all HTTP requests to HTTPS. To do this, you can add the following line of code to the “app/Http/Kernel.php” file:
By making use of HTTPS, you can help ensure that the data that is sent between your web server and web browser is encrypted and protected from hackers.
6. Use In-built Laravel Security Features
To prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data, use Laravel’s built authentication and authorization features. This prevents sensitive information on your website from becoming public and keeps it private for users only.
SQL injection attacks can be avoided by using prepared statements and parameter binding. The vulnerability of SQL question injection will increase when user inputs like server variables, cookies, and input values like “GET” and “POST” are used.
7. Take Precautions During Mass Assignments
In Laravel, you can use the create() and update() methods to perform mass assignments. However, if not handled properly, mass assignments can create a security vulnerability by allowing an attacker to inject malicious data into your application.
To protect your website from mass assignment vulnerabilities, you can use Laravel’s built-in mass assignment protection. This feature allows you to specify which attributes of a model can be mass assigned, and which cannot.
You can use the $fillable property in your model to specify which attributes can be mass assigned. For example:
Alternatively, you can use the $guarded property to specify which attributes cannot be mass assigned:
8. Validate and Filter Data
It’s also important to validate any data that is submitted through forms, to ensure that it meets the requirements of your application. Laravel provides built-in validation methods, you can use them to validate the input data before it’s used in the application.
9. Reduce Laravel Security Vulnerabilities from CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery)
Laravel provides built-in protection against CSRF attacks by generating a token that is included in all forms and requests. This token is verified on the server side to ensure that the request is coming from a legitimate source.
To use Laravel’s built-in CSRF protection, you can include the “@csrf” blade directive in your forms.
Amazed by the features a Laravel web application has in store?
Don’t worry, we can help it benefit your app too!
Top Tips For Your Application To Improve Laravel Performance
1. Routes Cache
Now you don’t need to worry about the amount of time it is taking to parse and generate your routes as Laravel has got route caching optimization technique to help laravel generate a single file of all your application’s routes ultimately boosting up your application’s load time.
To cache your routes in Laravel, you can use the command
This command will generate a single file containing all of your application’s routes and store it in the bootstrap/cache directory.
You can use the following command to clear the routes cache –
2. Use Eager Loading
Laravel’s Eloquent ORM, with its powerful eager loading feature, enables you to efficiently retrieve related data with just one query. This not only reduces the number of database queries but also significantly enhances the performance of your application. By leveraging the power of eager loading, you can smoothly transition from slow, sluggish database interactions to lightning-fast data retrieval.
3. Use the Deployer Tool
Although it cannot be regarded as a performance tip, it will help you save time, and that is important. If you’ve ever used composer to manage your project dependencies, using a deployer—which is a deployment tool—will feel very natural to you.
With a single command, Deployer can be used to automate the deployment process, including tasks such as code deployment, database migrations, and more.
4. Optimize Your Database
Make sure to optimize your database regularly by running queries like ANALYZE and OPTIMIZE. This improves database performance and reduces wait time for data.
5. Use a Reverse Proxy
A reverse proxy, such as Nginx or Varnish, can help improve the performance of your application by caching the responses of your web server. This can help reduce the amount of time that is spent waiting for data.
6. Use a CDN
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) can help improve the performance of your application by distributing your content across multiple servers. This can help reduce the amount of time that is spent waiting for data.
7. Leverage JIT Compiler
PHP is a server-side language that needs to be interpreted by a PHP runtime, such as the Zend Engine, in order to execute the code. The Zend Engine is the default runtime for PHP, and it includes a just-in-time (JIT) compiler that can help improve the performance of your Laravel application by compiling the code at runtime.
Using the JIT compiler can help reduce the amount of time that is spent compiling your code, which can result in faster execution times for your application. This is particularly beneficial for applications that have a lot of dynamic code, such as those that use a lot of user-generated data.
8. Picture Compression
To improve the performance of your mobile application, you must compress a number of images. To achieve this goal, there are several approaches you can take. Firstly, it’s important to note that different pictures require various tools to maintain their quality and photographic integrity. Thus, to effectively optimize your images, it’s essential to consider the specific requirements of each image.
Use an NPM package like “ImageMin” when compiling your images if you’re using Laravel Mix. Try “TinyPNG” to first reduce the size of a very large image before using ImageMin to reduce it as much as you can.
9. Classmap Development
Try to group together all of your inclusive files. This laravel performance hack tip will assist you in maintaining a consistently operational business app. Every time a new file is added, the newly created common file will automatically include it.
10. Precompile Assets
Laravel provides the artisan command “php artisan optimize” which can be used to precompile assets and improve the performance of your application. This Laravel artisan optimize command will concatenate and minify your JavaScript and CSS files, as well as other assets, and store them in a single location.
Furthermore, by precompiling your assets, you can help improve the performance of your application by reducing the number of files that need to be loaded and the amount of data that needs to be transferred. This can result in faster load times for your application and a better user experience.
11. Asset Bundling
Assets bundling is a technique that can help improve the performance of your Laravel application by combining multiple assets into a single file. This can help reduce the number of requests that need to be made to the server and the amount of data that needs to be transferred. Eventually, in faster load times for your application and a better user experience.
You can then use the command “npm run production” to bundle your assets and prepare them for production.
It’s also important to note that you should use the “mix.version()” method, to add a unique version to the bundled assets. This will ensure that the browser loads the updated version of your assets when they are changed, instead of using the cached version.
12. Use Pagination
Using pagination is a technique that can help improve the performance of your Laravel application by breaking large data sets into smaller, more manageable chunks. This can help reduce the amount of data that needs to be loaded and processed at once. Additionally resulting in faster load times and a better user experience.
It can be easily implemented using the “paginate()” method on Eloquent models or query builders.
For example, you can use the following code to paginate a query for all users:
This will return a paginator instance, which includes the current page of data, as well as information about the total number of pages and the total number of records. You can use this paginator instance in your view to display the data and navigation controls for the pagination.
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Conclusion
We assure you that following the above tips and tricks would result in better and optimized performance of your laravel applications. Now all you need to do is to abide by the tips in the future.
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Contact us to help you bring your project to life.
FAQs
Laravel performance optimization is the process of improving the speed and efficiency of a Laravel application. This can include techniques such as caching, pagination, and precompiling assets.
Performance optimization is important for Laravel because it can help improve the speed and efficiency of your application. Eventually resulting in faster load times and a better user experience. Additionally, it can also help reduce server load, which can lead to cost savings.
Common performance optimization techniques for Laravel include caching, pagination, precompiling assets, using a JIT compiler, and optimizing your database and indexes.
You can test the performance of your Laravel application using tools such as Apache JMeter, Blackfire, GTMetrix, and New Relic. These laravel speed test tools can help measure the performance of your application, including response time, memory usage, and other metrics.
Yes, Laravel Mix is a package that can be used to bundle your assets in a Laravel application. It’s a wrapper around webpack, a popular JavaScript module bundler, and provides a simplified Laravel API performance optimization for compiling and bundling assets.
Caching is the process of storing data temporarily in order to improve the performance of your application. While pagination breaks large data sets into smaller, more manageable chunks to improve your application’s performance by reducing the number of requests made to the server and the amount of data loaded and processed at once.
