Laravel development and upgrades

Laravel development and upgrades is building new Laravel applications, APIs and admin panels, and doing the harder work on existing ones: major-version upgrades, queue and cache architecture, test coverage and performance. Laravel is my main stack. It is for teams with a Laravel app several versions behind, products that need a Laravel backend for a web or mobile front end, and companies moving CodeIgniter, Symfony or plain PHP onto Laravel.

The TopGear India CMS, moved from CodeIgniter on shared hosting to Laravel on Google Cloud, is this work in production; its main pages went from 1–3 min → 3 s.

Every engagement starts by reading the code, the dependencies and the deploy set-up, and writing down the risks before proposing anything. For a build, the result is a plan with the data model, the API and the admin screens. For an upgrade, it is a path that treats each major version as its own step, with tests added around the risky parts first.

Upgrades follow Laravel's own upgrade guide one major version at a time, each on its own branch, with dependencies updated, deprecations fixed and the test suite green before the step is deployed. Laravel's support policy gives each release bug fixes for 18 months and security fixes for two years, so I plan the next step before the current version's security window closes rather than after.

For performance, the usual causes are the ones Laravel's documentation warns about: the N+1 query problem, where related records load once per row, fixed with eager loading and the right indexes; slow work done inside the request instead of a queue; and reads that should be cached, with cache tags so related entries can be cleared together. Queues run under Horizon with retries and failed-job handling. Octane, which boots the application once and keeps it in memory between requests, is considered only when measurements show framework boot time matters, because it changes how state behaves.

New code comes with Pest or PHPUnit tests and OpenAPI documentation for every endpoint.

It is not WordPress plugin or theme work, and it is not the right offer if your backend has to be Node.js or Python; web platforms and SaaS covers those. It is also not a rewrite by default: most Laravel apps several versions behind can be brought current in place.