Marcus launched his Laravel e-commerce site last month. Development went smoothly. Testing went well. But things changed when real customers started using the site.
Pages took six seconds to load. Shopping carts froze. Checkout errors appeared everywhere.
He saw 40% of his visitors leave during the first week.
The problem was that Marcus built a working site, but he never considered speed. There was no caching. Database queries were out of control. Full-size images used up too much bandwidth. Each request put a heavy load on the server.
Most Laravel apps are slow because of a handful of common mistakes. Once you identify the cause of the slowdown, the fixes take only a few minutes.
This guide covers real performance improvements that work on Laravel applications handling heavy traffic in 2026.
Why Laravel Speed Optimization Actually Matters Now
Your users lost patience back in 2018. Studies show that 53% of mobile visitors bail if your site takes more than 3 seconds to load. Not “might leave” or “could bounce.” They’re gone.
Google’s Core Web Vitals measure your site speed and are used in rankings. Slow Laravel apps sink in search results, even when the content is great. Your faster competitors will outrank you simply because they load more quickly.
Then there’s money. Sloppy code means paying for way more server power than you need. A well-tuned Laravel app runs fine on a $20 VPS rather than a $100 dedicated server. That’s almost a thousand dollars saved every year just from cleaning up performance issues.
Speed has been a nice-to-have feature for years. Now it’s about keeping users around, showing up in search results, and not burning money on servers you shouldn’t need.
Laravel 12’s Latest Performance Upgrades
Laravel 12 was released in February 2025, bringing some websites reduced queries. Many developers upgraded but never enabled the new features.
Asynchronous caching means your app can store cached data without making users wait. Before, caching blocked the response. Now it happens behind the scenes. This cuts 200-300ms off most requests without changing any code.
Laravel 12 actually warns you during development when you’re about to create N+1 query disasters. It’ll tell you, “You’re running 500 database queries instead of 2,” before you deploy. Saves so much headache.
Route matching got about 40% faster thanks to the enhanced routing engine. Small apps won’t notice, but high-traffic sites see real improvement.
Native health checks let you monitor everything without extra packages. Your server can ping /health and immediately detect if the database or cache has gone down.
Most of these run automatically after upgrading to Laravel 12. If you’re still on version 10 or 11, updating gives you these boosts for free.
Slow Laravel? Here Are 7 Fixes That Won’t Waste Your Time
1. Cache Your Routes, Config, and Views
During development, Laravel constantly reloads configuration files and recompiles templates. Great for local testing. Terrible for production.
Before you deploy, run:
php artisan config:cache
php artisan route:cache
php artisan view:cache
Everything gets pre-compiled into optimized files. Most sites see response times drop 30-40% just from this. When you push updates, run php artisan optimize:clear and rebuild.
2. Stop N+1 Queries with Eager Loading
This kills more Laravel apps than anything else. You load 100 blog posts and loop through them to display author names. Laravel runs 1 query for posts, then 100 separate author queries.
One hundred and one database hits when you needed two.
Fix it with eager loading:
php
// Bad – N+1 query problem
“`php
$posts = Post::all();
foreach ($posts as $post) {
echo $post->author->name; // 100 extra queries!
Install Laravel Debugbar in development. It highlights every N+1 problem in bright red. Fix them all before going live.
3. Switch to Redis for Sessions and Cache
File-based caching causes Laravel to constantly read and write to disk. Redis keeps everything in RAM, which runs about 100 times faster.
// 1. Install Redis: sudo apt install redis-server
// 2. Update .env:
CACHE_DRIVER=redis
SESSION_DRIVER=redis
QUEUE_CONNECTION=redis
Most decent hosts include Redis by default now. The speed difference is night and day, especially when traffic spikes.
4. Add Database Indexes Where They Matter
Databases crawl when searching thousands of rows without indexes. Filtering posts by category_id? That column needs an index.
Add them in migrations:
php
$table->index(‘category_id’);
$table->index([‘user_id’, ‘created_at’]);
Check your slow query logs to see which columns need indexing. One missing index can turn a 50ms query into a 2-second disaster.
5. Remove Service Providers You Don’t Use
Laravel loads a ton of service providers automatically. Many apps never touch broadcasting, notifications, or mail during most requests.
Open config/app.php and comment out what you’re not using. Memory usage drops, and boot time gets 10-15% faster.
Just don’t randomly delete things. Test everything after making changes.
6. Move Slow Tasks to Background Queues
Sending emails, uploading files slowly, or building reports shouldn’t require users to wait. Nobody wants to stare at a loading screen for 8 seconds while a PDF generates.
Queue slow operations:
php
// Don’t do this
Mail::to($user)->send(new WelcomeEmail());
// Do this instead
Mail::to($user)->queue(new WelcomeEmail());
“`
Start a queue worker with `php artisan queue:work`. Users get instant responses; heavy lifting happens behind the scenes.
7. Turn On OPcache for PHP
OPcache stores compiled PHP code in memory. Without it, PHP reads and compiles your entire application on every request.
Check if it’s enabled:
“`
php -i | grep opcache
Not seeing it? Ask your host to enable it or update php.ini yourself. This one change can double your throughput.
Before and After: Real Performance Numbers
Here’s what actually happens when you optimize a typical Laravel app:
| Metric | Before | After | Improvement |
| Homepage Load | 4.2s | 1.1s | 74% faster |
| Database Queries | 47 | 8 | 83% fewer |
| Memory Usage | 48MB | 22MB | 54% reduction |
| Requests/Second | 120 | 580 | 383% increase |
These numbers came from a real e-commerce site running 5,000 products and 200 daily orders. Most devs skip this step. Don’t, but the pattern holds: optimization makes a massive difference.
Laravel Hosting: What Actually Matters for Speed
Perfect code still runs slow on garbage hosting.
VPS hosting gives you control. You manage PHP versions, memory limits, and background processes yourself. Look for PHP 8.2 or newer – it’s legitimately 30% faster than 8.0. NVMe SSDs instead of spinning drives. Redis is included by default, not as a paid add-on.
Managed Laravel hosting comes preconfigured. Queue workers run automatically. Caching works out of the box. PHP settings are already tuned for Laravel’s specific needs. BigCloudy’s Laravel plans handle this setup, but the real value is skipping hours of server configuration.
The difference? VPS means flexibility for complex deployments. Managed means shipping faster without DevOps headaches.
Conclusion
Pick three things from this guide and fix them today. Start with route caching, hunt down N+1 queries, and switch to Redis if your host supports it.
Don’t try optimizing everything simultaneously. Profile your app first. Find the biggest bottleneck. Fix that specific issue. Then move to the next problem.
Most Laravel performance issues stem from five or six common mistakes. Fix those, and your app will easily handle 5-10x more traffic without requiring a server upgrade.
FAQs
Server power doesn’t fix bad code. A single N+1 query can trigger thousands of unnecessary database calls, no matter how powerful your CPU is. Install Laravel Debugbar to see what’s actually slowing you down before throwing money at bigger servers.
Yes. AI systems prioritize fast, reliable sources during content extraction. Sites that load over 2.5 seconds are filtered before citation consideration. BigCloudy’s optimized hosting ensures sub-200ms response times, keeping your content consistently accessible to both AI agents and human visitors.
Laravel Telescope or Debugbar both show database queries, memory usage, and response times for every request during development. Pages running 20+ queries or eating 50MB of memory need immediate attention.
Yeah, massively. Just routing and config caching cut response times by 30-40% on most apps. Database query caching can reduce server load by 70% or more when you’re reading data frequently. Start with Laravel’s built-in caching before moving on to anything more complex.
Octane (using Swoole or RoadRunner) keeps your app in memory between requests, which eliminates bootstrap overhead entirely. It’s powerful but adds complexity. Try standard optimizations first. If you need sub-100ms responses after that, then consider Octane.
Laravel includes way more features out of the box, which adds minor overhead. A properly optimized Laravel app performs just as well as any other PHP framework. The developer productivity gains usually outweigh tiny performance differences.
Only when deploying code changes. Run php artisan optimize:clear, then rebuild with php artisan optimize. Never clear caches during normal operation. That defeats the whole point and tanks your performance.
