The demand for applications & websites is growing day by day with the smart phone market flourishing at a rapid speed. There are different web development platform and new ones are released frequently and Laravel is one of the most popular PHP frameworks in the market. However, if optimum results in the form of robust, secure and scalable applications have to be achieved, a certain set of best practices need to be followed. Let’s take a brief look at these:
Use the Latest Version
Always prefer to use the latest version of Laravel Development Service for the website. You will get a web solution that is highly-performing and secure.
Laravel 7 is now released and has many new features such as Blade component tags, Laravel Airlock, better routing speed, custom eloquent casts, New HTTP client, and CORS support and so on.
Maintain Coding Standards
Laravel also follows internal code development standards, where you can be sure to keep your variables compatible with the composer. Laravel does not keep any restrictions for following the coding standards. But the experts’ advise you to follow the PSR-2 & PSR-4 coding standards for your project.
The PSR-2 has a single style guide for PHP code that results in uniformly formatted shared code. The PSR-4 describes a specification for auto-loading classes from file paths. It is fully interoperable, that can be used for any other auto-loading specification and describes where to place files that will be auto-loaded as per specification. You can also use tools like GrumPHP for improving Laravel Coding Standards.
Use Artisan CLI
Laravel provides you its own artisan CLI for making your web development smooth by using the Symfony console component as its foundation. You can choose one of the best artisan CLI for a better web development process.
Artisan CLI affects the web development process in a positive manner where you can also use different tools for your project. Artisan commands also helps in task scheduling & triggering actions on the occurrence of an event. You can fire an Artisan command from an HTTP route by using an Artisan façade.
Use Plugins Wisely
Instead of using several plugins & services in your Laravel web solution you can simply disable the unwanted plugins which are not required for your project with the help of the developer. Such a step will not disturb the rest of the functions that are already running on the website.
Using Eloquent ORM
Eloquent ORM is one of the best features of the Laravel website that is used for extracting data from a single query & displayed to the end-user. While using Laravel, you have to take care of the naming convention of your model.
By ensuring the following process, you will be able to make sure that your promoted web solution does not have to face any issues related to eloquent.
Use SSL, HTTPS
SSL makes the information unreadable to everyone else apart from the recipient. SSL certification is also used in the project by Hire Laravel Developers for keeping sensitive information encrypted on the internet. In this way when the data is sent to a person, only that particular person is able to access it & decrypt it.
While your data contains very sensitive information then HTTPS is something that you should make use of instead of HTTP. It will secure all your credentials and information such as password, customer data and so on.
Keep Database Clean
For a better web development solution, you need to keep your Laravel web development as clean as possible. You should clear out all the old cache files present in the database and that can be done while keeping session files intact.
While your website is taking regular backups, then it will be stored in the database. You should clear out all the old backups which are no longer in use.
Use CDN
Content Delivery Network is a server that is spread across geographically & possesses many nodes, where each node caches the static content that is present on the website like structural components, CSS, JS files, & images.
By using CDN the website load time will get decreased significantly as all the static content will be displayed quickly.
Optimize Images
While your Laravel project contains a huge number of image copies, then you must keep them optimized. You should remove the unnecessary images so that it will not decrease the web page loading time. Adjusting the size of the will increase the web page loading time and display it properly on the screen.
Check and Optimize Load Time
If your page load speed goes from second to 3 then the bounce rate increases probably to 32% that indicates, you need to increase your website page load speed. This is due to the fact that page load time is directly connected with your website performance and impacts the user experience & user engagement.
So if your website page load speed is more than 3 seconds to load, it will affect negatively on your website performance. It is better to optimize your website in terms of page load and offer a great user experience that will also boost traffic to your site.
Apart from these, there are other factors that one needs to take care of. Here’s a list of the dos and don’ts that will save you a lot of time and in turn assist you in writing better efficient web applications:
Don’t — Write database logic in view or controller
Sometimes you may find some functionality that requires you to write a bit complicated database logic. With Laravel being an MVC framework, the options are very few out of the box. This is where you have to get a bit creative. The database logic shouldn’t be written in the model as model is only for describing the database. This is where the Repository and Service can come in handy.
Do — Use resource controllers for CRUD operations
At first the resource controllers may not be a very good idea, or they may seem like a lot of work, but they are actually the one thing that makes development easier. For the common create, read, update and delete applications, use the Laravel Resource Controllers.
Don’t — Use a controller for more than one feature
Make your controllers as specific as possible. And make sure you use each controller per feature. Sometimes each model should have a corresponding controller. The benefit is that your controllers will remain very thin, and make debugging, maintenance and refactoring very easy later on.
Do — Use events for logic that is not directly relevant to features
For logic that is directly correlated with the controller, keep it in a separate class. This in Laravel is implemented as events. Take an example, you want send your users a welcome email every time someone signs up. You can keep the user creation logic inside the controller then trigger an event that will handle that logic.
<?php
namespace App\Http\Controllers;
use App\Http\Controller\Controller;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use App\User;
class RegistrationController extends Controller{
public function register(Request $request){
User::create([
“name”=>$request->name,
“email”=>$request->email
]);
event(UserRegistered($user));
return redirect()->back();
}
}
Don’t — Use Auth facade in controller constructor
All the controllers are resolved before the user is derived from the session. The session middlewares that add the current user session to the Auth object that is available inside the Auth facade, auth() helper, and request()/$request objects is run after all the controllers have been resolved from the service container. Hence if you try to access the Auth object inside the controller constructor the result will always be null.
Do — Use middleware for any route related logic
Sometimes you may want to perform route related logic in your applications, in these times you may tempted to write the logic inside the controller or routes/web.php. This logic is very safe if you create a middleware for it. And then register the middleware. This ensures that whatever the logic, it will be run before the controller is reached.
Don’t — Directly manipulate the database, always use migrations
This is basic Laravel principle. Do not do any database manipulations or schema changes directly. Always do so using migrations. This makes deployment very easy and at any moment you can reset the database to the current state without any difficulty.
Do — Use seeders and factories to populate testing/development data in database
Similar to the previous point, always use the database seeders in your tests. This gives you control over which data to be used during testing, allows data to be generated by single command, and makes the tests themselves easily reproducible once someone has downloaded the source code. This makes the project self-contained.
Don’t — write validation logic inside controller use form requests.
For simple applications, you can write the validation logic inside the controller, but as the app scales and more features are required it will become more difficult to maintain and refactor the code.
Do — Always extract components from your blade views
Laravel is made to use components out of the box. This will allow you to avoid repetition of your code. For example, instead of writing header and footer on each html file, you can just create component once and reuse the component in every file.
Final Thoughts
As Laravel provides seamless ease to the developers to execute custom-defined operations, you can easily perform the functional tasks with the above best Laravel web development practices or opt for the leading Laravel Development Company that provide you the best services for you next project.
