Livewire Blaze Made My Laravel App 10x Faster

Livewire Blaze Made My Laravel App 10x Faster

I've been writing Laravel applications for years. Blade has been there since day one — reliable, familiar, the kind of templating engine you stop thinking about because it just works. And that's exactly the problem. I stopped thinking about it. I assumed the rendering layer was as fast as it could reasonably be, and I focused my optimization efforts elsewhere: database queries, caching strategies, queue workers, CDN configurations.

Then Caleb Porzio — the same person who built Livewire and Alpine.js — dropped Livewire Blaze. And within fifteen minutes of installing it, I watched a page that took a full second to render finish in 94 milliseconds.

Not after a major refactor. Not after rewriting my components. After running one Composer command and adding a single line to my service provider.

I almost didn't believe the numbers. So I ran the benchmark again. Same result. Then I cleared caches, restarted the server, and ran it cold. Still under 100 milliseconds. That's when I realized I'd been leaving massive performance on the table — not because my code was bad, but because the rendering engine underneath it had a ceiling I never questioned.

Here's everything I've learned after a week of testing Blaze across three production applications, including the optimization strategy most people will miss and the edge cases where the numbers don't look as pretty.

What Blaze Actually Does Under the Hood

Before I show you the benchmarks, you need to understand why Blaze is fast. Not the marketing pitch — the actual mechanics. Because understanding the "why" tells you when it'll help and when it won't.

Standard Laravel Blade compiles your .blade.php templates into plain PHP files. These compiled files get cached in storage/framework/views/. When a request comes in, PHP executes those compiled files to produce HTML. Fast enough for most applications. Nobody's complaining about a single Blade component rendering slowly.

The problem surfaces at scale. When you have a component that renders hundreds or thousands of times on a single page — a table row component, a card in a grid, a button in a repeated UI pattern — each render carries overhead. PHP has to resolve the component class, process attributes, evaluate conditionals, and concatenate strings for every single instance. Multiply that by thousands and the overhead becomes the bottleneck.

Blaze attacks this from three angles, and each one is worth understanding separately.

The function compiler is the default strategy. Instead of compiling Blade templates into standard PHP that instantiates component objects on every render, Blaze compiles them into optimized PHP functions. Functions are cheaper to call than objects are to instantiate. The compiled output is leaner, tighter, and skips the overhead that Blade's normal compilation process adds for flexibility you're probably not using.

Think of it like this: standard Blade gives every component a full set of tools — attributes handling, slot processing, inheritance support — whether the component needs them or not. Blaze analyzes what your component actually uses and compiles a function that does only that. No wasted motion.

Runtime memorization is the second layer. When the same component renders with the same props multiple times, Blaze can recognize the repetition and reuse previous output instead of re-executing the render logic. If you're rendering a button component 25,000 times and 90% of them share the same configuration, memorization means Blaze only does the actual work for the unique variations.

Compile-time folding is the aggressive option — and the one that produces the jaw-dropping numbers. Folding moves computation that normally happens at runtime into the compilation phase. If Blaze can determine during compilation that a particular expression will always evaluate to the same result, it folds that computation into a static value in the compiled output. The result: runtime execution approaches the speed of serving static HTML, because much of the dynamic work has already been resolved.

Each strategy builds on the previous one. The function compiler makes every render faster. Memorization eliminates redundant renders. Compile-time folding eliminates unnecessary computation. Together, they compound.

Now let me show you what that compounding looks like with real numbers.

The Benchmarks That Made Me Rethink Everything

I replicated Caleb's benchmark first — 25,000 button components on a single page — because I wanted a controlled comparison before testing on my own applications. The setup: a fresh Laravel 11 application, PHP 8.3, running locally on my MacBook.

Standard Laravel Blade:

• First run (cold cache): approximately 1,000 milliseconds. A full second.
• Subsequent runs (cached): approximately 600 milliseconds.

A full second to render a page isn't catastrophic. But it's noticeable. Users feel it. Google measures it. And that's with a simple button component — no database calls, no complex logic, just rendering.

Blaze with default function compiler:

• First run: approximately 200 milliseconds. Five times faster.
• Subsequent runs: approximately 180 milliseconds. Three times faster than cached Blade.

Already dramatic. One Composer install, one line of configuration, and first-run rendering is 5x faster. That's the kind of improvement that usually requires days of optimization work.

Blaze with compile-time folding enabled:

• First run: approximately 94 milliseconds. Over 10x faster than Blade's first run.
• Subsequent runs: approximately 86 milliseconds. Seven times faster than cached Blade.

Let me put that in context. Standard Blade takes a full second. Blaze with folding takes less than a tenth of a second. Same page. Same 25,000 components. Same server. The only difference is how the templates are compiled and executed.

The first-run numbers matter more than people realize. In production, your first visitor after a deployment hits cold caches. PHP OPcache might not be warm. Compiled views might have been cleared. That first-run penalty in standard Blade — the full second — hits real users. Blaze's first run at 94 milliseconds means your deployment-time performance penalty essentially disappears.

Now, 25,000 components on a single page is an extreme benchmark. Nobody ships that to production. But the ratios hold at more realistic scales too. I tested with 500 components (a large but realistic table or card grid) and saw consistent 3-5x improvements with the default compiler and 6-8x with folding enabled.

Those numbers convinced me to test on real applications. And that's where things got more interesting — and more nuanced.

What Happened When I Put Blaze in Production Code

I deployed Blaze to three applications over the past week. Each one taught me something different.

Application one: an admin dashboard with heavy table rendering. This app displays data tables with 200-500 rows, each row being a Blade component with conditionals for status badges, action buttons, and formatted values. The main dashboard page was rendering in about 340 milliseconds (Blade, cached).

After Blaze with the function compiler: 120 milliseconds. After enabling fold: 78 milliseconds. That's a 4.3x improvement with the safe default and a further jump with folding.

The subjective difference was noticeable immediately. The dashboard felt snappier. Not "I measured it and it's faster" snappier — "my client mentioned it feels faster" snappier. That's the threshold where optimization actually matters to the people using the software.

Application two: an e-commerce product listing page. This one renders product cards — image, title, price, rating, add-to-cart button — in a responsive grid. Typically 48-96 cards per page. The rendering was already reasonable at about 180 milliseconds.

After Blaze: 65 milliseconds with function compiler, 42 milliseconds with fold. Solid improvement, but the page was already fast. The gains are proportionally larger when you have more component instances. With under 100 components, you're optimizing something that wasn't a bottleneck.

Application three: a reporting tool that generates PDF-like HTML views. This is where I expected Blaze to shine, because the reports render thousands of line items as individual components. The biggest report template was taking about 2.8 seconds to render — genuinely painful, and the main performance complaint from users.

After Blaze with fold: 310 milliseconds. A 9x improvement. The report that used to make users tap their desk impatiently now appears almost instantly. This single result justified the entire investigation.

Here's the lesson across all three: Blaze's impact scales with the number of component renders per page. If your pages render a few dozen components, the improvement is real but modest. If your pages render hundreds or thousands, the improvement is transformational.

The question you should be asking about your own applications: which pages render the most component instances? Those are your Blaze candidates.

The Setup That Takes Five Minutes

One reason I'm writing about Blaze with this much enthusiasm is how absurdly simple the setup is. Most performance optimizations require careful planning, phased rollouts, and extensive testing. Blaze requires a Composer install and a single method call.

Step one: install via Composer.

composer require livewire/blaze

That's it. No configuration files to publish. No migrations. No environment variables.

Step two: register the optimization in your AppServiceProvider.

use Livewire\Blaze;

public function boot()
{
    Blaze::optimize(resource_path('views/components'));
}

Point it at your components directory. Blaze analyzes and optimizes everything inside it.

Step three: clear your existing Blade cache.

php artisan view:clear

This ensures fresh compilations so you can see the actual difference. Blaze won't fight with stale cached views, but clearing gives you a clean benchmark.

That's the default setup. Three steps, five minutes, and you're running the function compiler optimization on every component in the specified directory.

Step four (optional but recommended): enable compile-time folding.

Blaze::optimize(resource_path('views/components'), fold: true);

One parameter. The fold option tells Blaze to use the aggressive compile-time optimization strategy. In my testing, fold has been stable across all three applications. But if you're cautious — which is reasonable for production — start with the default compiler for a week, verify everything renders correctly, then enable fold.

Step five (optional): enable the debug profiler.

// In your .env or config
blaze_debug=true

This activates a web-based profiler that shows exactly what Blaze is doing: which components were optimized, how long each takes, and where the biggest gains are happening. I ran this during my initial testing on each app and it was invaluable for understanding the impact. Turn it off in production — the profiling itself adds overhead.

The entire process is non-destructive. Your Blade templates don't change. Your component classes don't change. Your tests still pass. Blaze operates at the compilation layer, beneath your application code. If something goes wrong, remove the Blaze::optimize() call and you're back to standard Blade rendering. No rollback complications.

That reversibility is a big deal. Most performance optimization work is invasive — once you refactor a query or restructure a cache layer, rolling back is expensive. Blaze is a light switch. On or off. That makes it easy to test in staging and trivial to revert if you hit an edge case.

The Edge Cases Nobody Mentions

I've been painting a rosy picture. Time for the caveats, because they exist and you'll hit them if I don't warn you.

Dynamic component resolution. If you use dynamic component names — <x-dynamic-component :component="$type" /> — Blaze can't optimize those at compile time because it doesn't know which component will be rendered until runtime. These components run through standard Blade. Not slower than before, but they don't get the Blaze speedup. If your architecture relies heavily on dynamic component resolution, your gains will be smaller than the benchmarks suggest.

Components with heavy PHP logic. Blaze optimizes the rendering layer — the template compilation and execution. If your component's render() method runs expensive PHP logic (database queries, API calls, complex calculations), Blaze speeds up the template portion but can't help with the logic. On a component where rendering takes 2 milliseconds but the method logic takes 50 milliseconds, Blaze optimizing the rendering to 0.5 milliseconds saves you 1.5 milliseconds. Real, but not transformational.

The implication: Blaze rewards components that are render-heavy and logic-light. Simple, presentational components that get repeated frequently are the ideal candidates. Complex components with significant business logic in the PHP layer benefit less.

Blade directives with side effects. If your templates use custom Blade directives that produce side effects — writing to logs, modifying session state, incrementing counters — compile-time folding might behave unexpectedly. Folding assumes expressions are pure (same inputs produce same outputs with no side effects). Side-effectful expressions that get folded might execute fewer times than expected. Stick with the function compiler (without fold) if your templates have side effects in directives.

Third-party component libraries. I tested Blaze with a project using a third-party Blade UI kit. Most components optimized correctly. Two components that used heavy slot manipulation with nested dynamic content didn't compile under fold mode — they fell back to standard rendering. Not a crash, not broken output, just no speedup for those specific components. The function compiler (without fold) handled them fine.

These edge cases affected maybe 5-10% of the components across my three test applications. The other 90-95% optimized cleanly with fold enabled. Your mileage depends on your component architecture.

Why This Matters Beyond the Numbers

I want to step back from the benchmarks for a moment and talk about what Blaze represents in the broader Laravel ecosystem.

For years, the performance conversation in Laravel land has centered on the same topics: Eloquent N+1 queries, Redis caching, queue optimization, Octane for persistent workers. The rendering layer was treated as a solved problem — fast enough, not worth optimizing. Blaze proves that assumption wrong.

What Caleb did here is look at a part of the framework everyone accepted as "good enough" and ask whether the ceiling was actually a ceiling or just a default nobody had pushed against. The answer — that rendering could be 10x faster with smarter compilation — suggests there are probably other "good enough" assumptions in our stacks that deserve the same scrutiny.

For me personally, Blaze changed how I think about component architecture. I used to avoid heavy component decomposition on high-render pages because I knew each component added overhead. A table with 500 rows? I'd be tempted to inline the row markup rather than extracting a component, because the rendering cost of 500 component instantiations was measurable.

With Blaze, that trade-off disappears. I can decompose aggressively — small, focused, reusable components — without paying a rendering penalty. Better code organization with no performance cost. That's the kind of improvement that makes you write better code, not just faster code.

If you're running Laravel in production and your pages render more than a handful of components, Blaze belongs in your stack. The installation takes five minutes. The risk is near zero — it's a non-destructive, easily reversible change. And the upside ranges from "measurably faster" to "order of magnitude faster" depending on your component density.

I installed it a week ago on a whim. I'm keeping it permanently on all three applications. The reporting tool alone — 2.8 seconds down to 310 milliseconds — paid for the fifteen minutes of total setup time across all three projects a thousand times over.

The only thing I regret is not questioning the "Blade is fast enough" assumption sooner. How many requests have my applications served over the years, each one carrying rendering overhead that didn't need to exist?

Don't make the same mistake. Run the Composer install. Add the one line. Clear your cache. Then open your heaviest page and watch the profiler.

You'll have the same reaction I did: how was this not always how Blade worked?

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