Laravel is a free, open-source PHP web framework that has been under active development since 2011 and is one of the most popular PHP frameworks with a robust community and wide range of features. Application performance is critical for web applications, making Laravel a strong choice for web development. Optimizing Laravel performance is crucial to growing user base, keeping users happy, and growing business. Factors that can negatively affect application performance include poor code quality, inefficient server configurations, and insufficient resources. Measuring performance involves utilizing monitoring tools such as New Relic, which provides detailed insights into various aspects of the application. Optimizing performance involves updating PHP and Laravel versions, debugging and optimizing with Laravel Debugbar, configuring error handling, considering Laravel Octane, utilizing route caching, using database caching, leveraging queues, generating class maps with Composer, leveraging dependency injection, monitoring and optimizing database transactions, using rate limiting, setting up baseline performance monitoring and proactive alerting. Optimizing Laravel performance improves user experience, faster content delivery, increased business revenue, reduced workload, and using New Relic to improve performance.