Laravel optimization techniques

When you need fast performance, there are many things you can do to optimize Laravel.

1. Recent version

Make sure you're using a recent version, like Laravel version 11 (in 2024).

Make sure your PHP version is 8.2 or 8.3 (in 2024) as they provide performance and security improvements.

Check a full list of Laravel versions here and a full list of PHP versions here.

2. Artisan commands

To optimize Laravel, add the following command to your deployment.

The files that will be cached, include your configuration, events, routes, and views:

# you likely already runs this, right? to update your database structure
php artisan migrate

# run optimize command
php artisan optimize

Remove all of the cache files with the following command:

php artisan optimize:clear

The optimize command (above) does the following:

php artisan config:cache
php artisan event:cache
php artisan route:cache
php artisan view:cache

Clear the individual caches with the following commands:

php artisan config:clear
php artisan event:clear
php artisan route:clear
php artisan view:clear

3. Optimize database queries

• Look into optimizing your database queries.
• Look into caching values that don't need to be super up-to-date
• Add indexes to make database queries much quicker.
• Use Eager loading where possible.
• Debugbar can be a helpful package during development

4. Minify

Minify css and javascript, using Webpack, Grunt or Vite for example.

5. CDN

Put Cloudflare in front of your site, or use a CDN like Amazon Cloudfront to host the static assets.