Speeding Up Your Laravel Application

Almost every slow Laravel app we've been hired to fix has the same root causes: unoptimized database queries, missing caching, heavy synchronous work happening during the request/response cycle, and unoptimized front-end assets. Laravel itself is fast — most performance problems are in how the application is built on top of it, not the framework.

1Why Laravel Apps Slow Down

Before reaching for advanced tools like Octane, it's worth diagnosing where the time actually goes. In our audits, the majority of "slow Laravel app" tickets trace back to just a handful of causes — and fixing them in the right order matters more than fixing them all at once.

2Fix Your Database Queries First

Database queries are responsible for the majority of slow page loads. Start here before touching anything else.

Eliminate N+1 queries with eager loading

// Slow — runs 1 query for posts + 1 query per post for its author
$posts = Post::all();
foreach ($posts as $post) {
    echo $post->author->name;
}

// Fast — runs 2 queries total
$posts = Post::with('author')->get();

Use the laravel/telescope or barryvdh/laravel-debugbar package during development to catch N+1 queries before they reach production.

Add indexes to columns you filter or join on

Schema::table('orders', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->index(['user_id', 'status']);
});

Select only the columns you need

$users = User::select('id', 'name', 'email')->get();

Use chunking for large datasets

User::where('active', true)->chunk(500, function ($users) {
    foreach ($users as $user) {
        // process
    }
});

3Cache Everything That Doesn't Change Every Request

Laravel's cache layer is underused on most projects we audit.

$categories = Cache::remember('categories.all', now()->addHours(6), function () {
    return Category::orderBy('name')->get();
});

CACHE_STORE=redis
SESSION_DRIVER=redis

Cache full config and routes for production — run these after every deployment:

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

4Move Slow Work to Queues

Anything that doesn't need to finish before you respond to the user — sending emails, generating PDFs, calling third-party APIs, processing images — should go on a queue, not run inline.

// Instead of this blocking the response:
Mail::to($user)->send(new OrderConfirmation($order));

// Do this:
Mail::to($user)->queue(new OrderConfirmation($order));

Run a proper queue worker in production with Supervisor so failed jobs retry automatically:

php artisan queue:work redis --tries=3 --backoff=10

For a full walkthrough of jobs, workers, and Supervisor setup, see our Laravel Queues guide.

5Speed Up the Framework Itself with Octane

For high-traffic applications, Laravel Octane (powered by Swoole or RoadRunner) keeps your application booted in memory between requests instead of bootstrapping Laravel from scratch on every single request. This can cut response times dramatically on CPU-light, high-throughput endpoints like APIs.

composer require laravel/octane
php artisan octane:install
php artisan octane:start

6Front-End and Asset Delivery

Backend speed doesn't matter if the browser is waiting 4 seconds for JavaScript and images.

• Build assets with Vite (Laravel's default bundler) for automatic code-splitting and minification
• Serve images in WebP/AVIF and lazy-load anything below the fold
• Use a CDN for static assets, especially if you serve international clients
• Enable Gzip or Brotli compression at the web server level (Nginx/Apache)

7Measuring the Results

Don't guess — measure before and after every change:

8Frequently Asked Questions