How to Improve Website Performance with PHP: 8 Key Techniques

A Complete Guide on How to Improve Website Performance with PHP: Tips and Techniques
 

PHP is a general-purpose programming language for making dynamic and interactive Web pages. PHP can generate dynamic page content and create, open, read, write, delete, and close server files. It is fast, flexible and pragmatic. From user experience to scalability and server costs,  its extensive features are among the most essential parts of modern PHP development that ensure your PHP application performs its best.

This tutorial will discuss the top 8 tips and techniques that improve website performance with PHP.

Top 8 Tips and Techniques On How To Improve Website Performance With PHP
 

The efficiency in terms of speed, responsiveness, and overall resource utilization of a web application defines PHP website performance. Regarding PHP performance, as with accessibility, you need to consider what device a site visitor uses to access the site and the connection speed. Reducing the website download and render time improves conversion rates and user retention. 

Here are the top 8 website performance optimization tips:

1. Optimize Your Code

For a PHP website performance, you need to optimize your application code. You should follow the following techniques to optimize the code:

• Choose a performant PHP framework supporting highly performant architectures based on the Middleware pattern instead of the MVC one, such as Laminas, Mezzio, Laravel 10.x, Symfony 6.x, etc.
   
• You should prevent the application from running out of memory
   
• Try to code your application to be stateless (no session mechanism active)
   
• You should avoid running queries in a loop; use native, optimized SQL queries instead
   
• You must first understand how the Swoole library works (OpenSwoole, Swoole) and then integrate it correctly into your web application (all the frameworks cited above support it).
   
• You can use static code analyzers to boost code quality.

2. Pick HTTP/2 for supporting HTTP Requests
 

You can architect PHP performance for a new application using the updated Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) HTTP/2. HTTP/2 is more powerful than HTTP/1.x and offers better overall web application performance. Developers can leverage the following advantages of HTTP/2 over HTTP/1.x:

• Reduces latency. It enables multiplexing of requests and responses
   
• It compresses the HTTP header fields effectively and reduces overheads for you.
   
• HTTP/2 allows request prioritization
   
• HTTP/2 includes more protocol enhancements, leading to better performance

3. To Cache

It is an essential feature that leads to improved PHP app performance.  Host a version of files in a temporary storage location for reduced latency and bandwidth consumption. It will improve overall PHP performance and user experience. Here are some things that you should know when developing your caching strategy for optimal PHP app performance:

• The HTTP cache: It stores the response associated with a request and then reuses the stored response for subsequent requests.
   
• Reverse proxy server caching: It acts as a surrogate. The proxy server intercepts user requests from the internet. It forwards them to the appropriate content host and caches the returned data for reuse to deliver that data to the requesting user.
   
• Database caching improves scalability by distributing query workload from the backend to multiple cheap front-end systems—possibly in memory—enhancing flexibility in processing the proprietary data.
   

4. Inspect and Optimize Your Server Configuration

Memory, access to the filesystem, DB queries connections, and overall timings, etc.,  if adequately presented, give all the hints on how to tweak the servers' configurations both at the PHP and web server levels. It will help deliver sufficient data to optimize connection pool configurations, memory limits, persistent connections, TCP configurations, and SSL.

5.Optimize  Front-End
 

Web browsers use HTTPS requests to fetch parts of the webpage from the web server, such as images, stylesheets, scripts, etc,. Depending on the site's needs, you may have a lot of large graphic files you need to load. However, incorrectly handling those large graphic files can make your website load slowly.

Irrespective of the file type, how and when it's loaded can impact page loading speed. For image files, that may mean choosing the appropriate resolution for different devices or changing the file size or type served in given situations. Here are some tips to consider when optimizing your web front-end:
 

• “Minifying” the size of files such as JavaScript and CSS by removing or shortening symbols.
   
• You should combine different JavaScript and CSS files into a single bundle wherever possible.
   
• Implement the asynchronous loading of JavaScript, involving the browser parsing the webpage even when the JavaScript is being loaded.
   
• Use a  CDN (Content Delivery Network) for static content so that when users access your site from around the world, it decreases the time it takes to serve the page to those users.

6. Choose PHP-FPM Process Management

Faster request handling and better resource management are the results of PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager), which manages numerous PHP processes more efficiently than the usual PHP handler, especially for websites with high traffic. Consider the following configuration advice:

• Ensure that pm.max_children is configured based on your server’s available RAM to avoid resource contention.

7. Enable Gzip Compression
 

You should compress files before sending them to the client, which can significantly reduce page load time and bandwidth usage. Most modern browsers support gzip compression. Here is the technique on how you can enable it:

Append the following lines to the .htaccess file (this is for Apache servers):

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
   AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css
   AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript application/x-javascript
</IfModule>
 

8. Optimize Database Performance

For any PHP website app performance, the database is important in handling high-traffic loads. You should consider these optimization techniques:

• Index Your Tables to ensure that frequently searched columns are correctly indexed.
   
• You should use a database cache tool to store data in memory, providing faster data retrieval than querying the database repeatedly.
   
• Avoid SELECT * Statements and fetch only the data you need.
   

Conclusion

Even though we've included a number of strategies to boost PHP performance here, this is only the beginning. Based on elements like hosting costs and user experience, PHP performance ultimately decides whether a web project succeeds or fails. PHP performance optimization is essential for boosting the speed and dependability of websites with a lot of traffic. Start with optimizing code, database interactions, and caching using the most recent versions of PHP. Sustained performance and customer satisfaction will be ensured by routine monitoring and adjustment based on traffic patterns.