Making a Laravel project fast is a common goal for many developers who want to create high-performance web applications with this popular PHP framework. There are many ways to optimize Laravel performance, such as:
Use route caching. Route caching can speed up your Laravel project by storing the results of your route registration in a single file, reducing the overhead of loading and parsing routes on every request. You can use the php artisan route:cache command to generate a cached routes file, and the php artisan route:clear command to clear it
Optimize Composer. Composer is a dependency manager for PHP that helps you install and update Laravel and its components. You can optimize Composer by using the composer dump-autoload –optimize command, which generates an optimized autoload file that maps all the classes and files used by your project. You can also use the composer install –no-dev command to install only the dependencies required for production, and skip the ones used for development
Reduce autoloaded services. Laravel uses a service container to manage the dependencies and services used by your project. You can reduce the number of services that are loaded on every request by using deferred service providers, which only load the services when they are needed. You can also use conditional service providers, which only load the services when certain conditions are met
Use Artisan commands and cache effectively. Artisan is a command-line interface for Laravel that provides many useful commands for optimizing your project. Some of the commands you can use are:
php artisan config:cache , which caches your configuration files in a single file for faster loading.
php artisan view:cache , which caches your Blade views as plain PHP code for faster rendering.
php artisan optimize , which runs several optimization commands at once, such as config:cache , route:cache , and view:cache .
php artisan cache:clear , which clears all the cached files generated by the previous commands.
You can also use Laravel’s built-in cache system to store frequently used data in a fast storage driver, such as Redis or Memcached, and reduce database queries
Reduce package usage. Laravel offers many packages that extend its functionality and features, but some of them may also affect its performance negatively. You should only use the packages that you really need for your project, and remove or disable the ones that you don’t use or that are outdated. You should also check the ratings, reviews, and support of the packages you use, and use tools like Laravel Package Training or Laravel Telescope to monitor their impact on your project
Upgrade to the latest version of PHP. PHP is the language that powers Laravel, and its performance has improved significantly over the years. Upgrading to the latest version of PHP can boost your Laravel project’s performance by taking advantage of its new features and optimizations, such as JIT compiler, preloading, opcache, etc. You should also check the compatibility of your Laravel version and your packages with the PHP version you want to upgrade to
These are some of the tips on how to make a Laravel project fast, but there are more techniques and tools that you can use to enhance your performance, such as using queues, caching query results, using eager loading for data, optimizing images, lazy loading images, excluding unused styles, using pagination for query results, etc You should also follow the best practices for Laravel performance, such as using a fast web server, a reliable web host, a secure database connection, etc