Blaze: Supercharging Blade Component Performance in Laravel

The Laravel ecosystem has a new performance powerhouse — Blaze, an innovative package designed to dramatically speed up the rendering of Blade components. Developed as part of the Livewire family, Blaze introduces compile-time optimizations that can make Blade component rendering much faster than traditional runtime rendering.

In this article, we’ll explore what Blaze is, why it’s hyped by the community, how it works, and how you can use it to boost performance in your Laravel applications.

What Is Blaze?

Blaze is a Laravel package created by the Livewire team that optimizes Blade components by folding static renderable sections at compile time. This significantly reduces the runtime overhead of rendering Blade templates, especially for UI components that are reused frequently across your app.

Blaze is currently in early stages (beta) but already shows huge performance wins — in benchmarks, some pages render up to 17× faster when using Blaze-eligible components.

Why It Matters for Laravel Developers

Blade is a beloved template engine in the Laravel ecosystem because of its simplicity and expressiveness. However, Blade was traditionally a runtime engine — meaning every component rendered on every request, even for static UI pieces like buttons, badges, or cards.

Blaze changes this by analyzing component templates before they’re served to the browser and pre-rendering the static parts. This results in:

• Lower CPU overhead per request

• Faster overall page render time

• Huge performance improvements on component-heavy pages

This is especially beneficial for applications with lots of repetitive UI components, such as dashboards, component libraries, or design system pages.

How Blaze Works (Simple Explanation)

Blaze uses a two-tier optimization strategy:

1. Compile-Time Folding

Blaze detects parts of your Blade component that are static (don’t change based on request data, user state, time, etc.) and pre-renders them during the compilation step.
This means fewer instructions run at runtime, speeding up rendering.

2. Runtime Memoization

When a component can’t be folded (due to dynamic data), Blaze automatically caches the rendered result based on component props and path — preventing repeated work for identical renders.

Installation

You can install Blaze in any modern Laravel project that meets the requirements:

composer require livewire/blaze:^1.0@beta

Blaze supports recent Laravel versions and requires PHP 8.1 or newer.

How to Use Blaze in Blade Components

Using Blaze is straightforward — you simply mark Blade components with the @blaze directive:

{{-- resources/views/components/button.blade.php --}}
@blaze

@props(['variant' => 'primary'])

<button class="btn btn-{{ $variant }}">
    {{ $slot }}
</button>

This tells Blaze that this component is pure and deterministic — meaning it renders the same output given the same inputs. Blaze will then try to fold and optimize it at compile time.

Best Practices: When to Use Blaze

Blaze excels with components that:

✔ Don’t depend on user session or authentication

✔ Don’t access database or external state

✔ Don’t include time-based or request-specific data

Typical candidates include UI building blocks such as:

• Buttons

• Cards

• Badges

• Typography elements

• Layout containers

These are the “design system” pieces that rarely change dynamically.

What Not to Blaze

Avoid using @blaze for components that include:

❌ CSRF tokens and forms

❌ User-specific data (auth()->user())

❌ Dynamic classes based on request state

❌ Pagination

❌ Timestamps or time-sensitive content

Blaze will automatically fall back to normal rendering or memoization for such cases to prevent bugs.

Advanced: Combining with @unblaze

If a component is mostly static but contains a small dynamic portion (like validation messages), Blaze offers the @unblaze directive to isolate dynamic sections:

@blaze
@props(['name'])

<div>
    <label>{{ $name }}</label>

    @unblaze
        <x-form.errors :name="$name" />
    @endunblaze
</div>

This instructs Blaze to optimize static parts while making specific sections dynamic.

Real World Performance Gains

Benchmarks published in the Blaze README show dramatic improvements in synthetic tests:

Without Blaze: 750ms
With Blaze:    45ms
~17× faster rendering

This kind of performance difference can be especially impactful in component-heavy UIs and large Laravel applications.

How Blaze Fits in Today’s Laravel Ecosystem

Livewire Blaze is part of a broader trend in Laravel tooling focused on speed and developer experience. Tools like Livewire itself already make building reactive UIs easier without leaving PHP. Blaze takes this further by addressing one of the core bottlenecks in Blade rendering — runtime overhead.

Developers in the community are watching Blaze closely, with many hoping it becomes part of core Laravel or more tightly integrated into future versions.

Final Thoughts

Blaze represents one of the most exciting advancements in the Laravel ecosystem in recent years. By bringing compile-time optimization to Blade components, it empowers developers to build fast, modern Laravel applications without sacrificing simplicity.

If your project uses many Blade components — especially static ones — Blaze is definitely worth evaluating.

The performance gains alone make it a compelling addition to any Laravel developer’s toolkit.