How to Make Your APIs Faster

• laravel tips

• Mar 28, 2025
• |
• By Ahmed sadek

How to Make Your APIs Faster

APIs are the foundation of modern applications. Whether you’re creating a mobile app, a single-page frontend, or connecting with third-party services, your API's speed impacts user experience. Slow APIs can frustrate users, cause timeouts, and result in lost business.

In this article, I will share techniques I use in Laravel and backend projects to make APIs faster and more dependable.

1-Optimize Database Queries

Most slow APIs are caused by inefficient database access.

 -  Use Eager Loading: Avoid the N+1 query problem with with().

// ❌ Slow
$posts = Post::all();
foreach ($posts as $post) {
    echo $post->user->name;
}

// ✅ Fast
$posts = Post::with('user')->get();

• - Add Proper Indexes: Ensure columns used in WHERE, JOIN, or ORDER BY have indexes.
• - Paginate Results: Don’t return thousands of rows in one response.

2- Implement Caching 

Reduce database hits by caching frequent results.

• - Response Caching:

• $posts = Cache::remember('latest_posts', 600, function () {
      return Post::latest()->take(10)->get();
  });
  
  

• - Tagged Caching: Group related data for easier invalidation.
• - Use Redis or Memcached for high-performance caching.

note: if you use Caching you need to design strategy what you will chache? when you will delete cached data?

3- Minimize Payload Size

Large responses slow down APIs.

• - Return only the fields you need using API Resources.
• - Compress JSON responses (Laravel can gzip automatically).
• - Remove unnecessary nesting and metadata.

4-Use Queues for Heavy Tasks

Don’t block the API response with time-consuming operations.

• - Offload tasks like sending emails, processing files, or calling external APIs to queues and jobs.
• Example:

• SendInvoiceEmail::dispatch($invoice);
  return response()->json(['message' => 'Invoice queued for sending']);
  
  

This way, your API responds instantly while background workers handle the heavy lifting

5- Enable HTTP and Gzip

At the server level:

- Enable HTTP/2 for multiplexed requests.

 - Enable Gzip or Brotli compression to reduce response size.

6- Optimize Authentication

• - Use JWT or Laravel Sanctum for lightweight authentication instead of heavy session-based checks.
• - Cache user permissions/roles instead of checking the database for every request.

7- Use Rate Limiting & Throttling

Fast APIs can be abused. Protect performance with:

• - Laravel’s ThrottleRequests middleware
• - API gateway limits (e.g., Nginx, Cloudflare, or Kong)
• - Different limits for authenticated vs. guest users

8. Use Database and Query Caching

• - Use Query Caching in MySQL or Postgres for repeated queries. 
• - Use Materialized Views for complex reporting queries. 
• - Pre-calculate common statistics in a nightly job instead of on-demand.

9-Use Proper Indexing

Indexes are like a “table of contents” for your database. Without them, the DB engine scans the entire table for every query.

• - Index columns used in WHERE, JOIN, and ORDER BY.
• - Use composite indexes when filtering by multiple fields.
• - Monitor unused indexes — too many indexes can slow down writes.

10- Select Only What You Need

Fetching unnecessary data wastes time and memory.

// ❌ Bad: Loads all fields

$users = User::all();

// ✅ Good: Loads only required fields

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