Cutting Response Times: How I Reduced Laravel Page Load Times by 50%

Working on a client’s Laravel application, I noticed how bad it was for performance-the page load time went up to 600–900ms. The application wasn’t exactly broken, but the user experience was ruined, possibly leading to a lower conversion rate. As developers, we surely know that speed matters; that was my challenge to optimize the system.

By implementing several targeted improvements, I was able to reduce page load times by 50%. Here’s the breakdown of how it was achieved.

Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash

The Problem: Why Were Load Times So High?

To begin with, I analyzed the application’s performance using Laravel Debugbar and Grafana. These revealed a few major issues:

1. Slow server response times: The Apache server wasn’t optimized for the PHP-FPM process.
2. High database query load: too many queries were running inefficiently.
3. Eager loading overhead: The relationships in the application were loading more data than necessary.
4. Caching bottlenecks: Some pages weren’t using caching effectively.

The Solutions: Steps to Achieve 50% Faster Load Times