Speed up a slow Laravel or PHP site: fix the 5 slowest spots

Pages that take ages to open, an admin that hangs on a report, an API that times out when a few dozen people use it. In most Laravel and PHP apps the cause is a handful of queries, and the server is fine.

What I do:
- Profile the slow pages and queries with query logs, Laravel Debugbar or Telescope, and EXPLAIN
- Fix N+1 queries, add or rework indexes, and rewrite the heavy queries
- Add Redis caching where it actually helps
- Move slow jobs such as emails, exports and imports into background queues

What you get: fixes for the 3 to 5 slowest spots as a pull request, and a short report with load times measured before and after on the same data. You see measured numbers for your own app.

Works with Laravel and plain PHP on MySQL or PostgreSQL. I've worked with PHP 8 and Laravel through 6 years of commercial development, including Laravel 12 marketplaces and the admin of ArmadaBoost, a marketplace with around 100k users a month.

One thing to check first: if the site sits on shared hosting with no database access, tell me before ordering. I'll say straight away whether code changes will help or a server move is the better fix.