Top 5 Secret PHP Performance Optimization Tips to Improve Success Rate

PHP stands for Hypertext preprocessor. It is a server-side scripting language. It is fast, easy to use and allows developers to use it according to the client’s requirements. This makes it highly preferable among developers for web development. Are you planning for PHP website development? Want to hire a PHP developer? Then, you land at the right place and at the right time. Here, not only you will get to know about the PHP performance optimization tips but also benefited from the tricks and tactics to improve the performance of your PHP web design.

In the market, PHP has already released its latest version PHP7.x and it is doing wonders in the field of web development. Some popular names which boast PHP as their backbone are Facebook, Yahoo, Flicker, Tumblr, etc. and the count is growing every day with the development of thousands of PHP based websites.

But things do not end with just website development, proper maintenance is required for the optimal performance of your PHP powered application. Business owners can easily understand how important is to enhance the overall performance of their website. Because the websites not only provide great UX for end-users but also is a platform to generate revenue. Here you can find the list of top PHP developers.

5 Important PHP Performance Optimization Tips

In this article, we are going to discuss five relatively quick and easy checks which will help you in increasing PHP web performance. Let’s start with a sort of action necessary to improve the performance of server-side PHP code.

Caching

In the list of various website performance optimization practices, caching ranks top. Caching not only enhances the website’s UX experience but also helps in increasing web application performance by reducing page download times. This strategy is easy to implement and important to attain speedy recovery for your PHP web application.

Basically, the cache can be understood as a copy of your HTML pages or images stored at a web server. When the user visits websites for the second time these stored entities are presented to the visitor. Due to this, the unnecessary cache can hamper the performance of your website.

So, the caching strategy should be performed especially on the server-side which will result in reducing offload times of your website to a great extent. To perform caching, you can select any of the tools available in the market. Caching will help in increasing page load times of your PHP web application. Other than this, it will rank you high in search engine result pages and save memory requirements as well.

Profiling

If you’re lucky, caching alone can increase web performance to the level that is needed at the moment. But to attain the next level, you have to adopt other approaches as well. It will not only enhance your PHP web performance but also boost your user experience and conserve hosting costs.

Profiling is another hack, one can opt for better web performance. You can do profiling of your website from any of the open-source tools available in the market. It will give you an exact portion of your PHP code taking most of the time. The most commonly used among them is Xdebug. As its name implies, Xdebug was initially launched as a debugging tool. However, the utility of profiling was added to it later.

For any, it is not possible to keep up application performance with ever-increasing user expectations. But proper monitoring and the optimization of functionalities mentioned above can work in your favour and offer outstanding performance to your application.

Related Article: How Much Does a PHP Developer Cost For Custom Web Development?

Suppress Loops

Loops are powerful programming tools and when you hire PHP programmers, they habitually use them. In PHP web design, generally, 4 types of loops are used to execute a block of code several times. They are a time-saving development tool, still, several times loops cause bottlenecks.

For instance, if a certain code executes slowly then it’s not a major problem, but the same code is in a loop that can magnify the problem. So, are loops bad? No, but you need to assess code carefully especially in the nested loops to avoid possible problems.

Memorize all the source code of the application, is difficult for the developers. However, they should know where are big loops and why. So in the case of the blockade, they can easily trace the code slowing down the execution speed and take appropriate action for web performance optimization.

In such a situation, sometimes you need to refactor old scripts having performance trouble. To find loops with problems, you can opt for techniques like the profiler and refactor the heaviest.

For profiling, there are several tools available in the market. Popular among them are Xdebug and Zend Debugger which help in creating profiling reports. If you go with Xdebug, you can also make use of Web grind, a web front-end for Xdebug. These reports help in finding bottlenecks and blockades in the code. Well, the bottleneck is a problem, but it iterated 10000 times, it becomes a 10000x bigger problem. So try not to forget such issues for a better PHP web performance.

Also Read: Everything You Should Know About PHP Web Development

Minify Static Scripts

A web application developed using PHP software also consists of several scripts like JS, CSS, HTML, etc. Therefore, in an overall web application’s performance, not only PHP but also these scripts also play a vital role.

If you want to reduce total processing time and increase the loading speed of an application, minifying these static scripts is a good approach. To do so, there are several manual steps available which include minimizing server requests, minimizing downloadable elements’ size, Load order optimization, merging, refreshing JavaScript and CSS files, and so forth.

Every time you don’t need to perform these manual processes. You can also try some tools easily available in the market likewise JS & CSS Script Optimizer or JavaScript Minifier, etc.

Review Database Access

In terms of web performance problems, you can consider database access as the main source for web performance without even inspecting the code. And probably, you are right, Database connections are expensive operations, especially in the case of PHP language due to the lack of connection pooling.

In addition to this, we do measure the difference between a simple query using an index or not, to evaluate web performance. The difference may be considerably big which we need to measure to rectify the issue for improved process performance.

To do so, the best advice would be to check your database indexes. SQL queries with wrong indexes tend to slow down the performance of a web application. And it should not end with just a single checking on database indexes. You must perform this activity several times since as the data grows, indexing may change.

Conclusion

If you’re struggling with the same PHP web performance issue, you can adopt the above-mentioned PHP performance optimization tips. Out of these, you can perform a few activities on your own by finding related issues based on the current performance of your web application.

On the other hand, some issues require technical expertise. For which you can consult or hire a PHP programmer from us. The NineHertz is a renowned PHP web development company in India with a team of highly skilled and experienced PHP developers. You can contact us for any such queries related to PHP website performance optimization.