As I fired up the blog machine again—upgrading Laravel from 9 to 12 and Statamic from 4 to 5—it didn’t take long to hit some pretty big bumps. Turns out, a quick-and-dirty upgrade doesn’t play nice with major Laravel changes. Performance tanked almost instantly.

The defaults for database drivers and cache stores had shifted, and getting things tuned for Statamic 5 wasn’t exactly well-documented. I had been using CACHE_STORE=array, which spiked my load time from around 150ms to over 1,020ms.

After a deeper dive into the Laravel docs and poking around the cache config file, I swapped to file in my .env—no deploy needed—and watched load times drop to 75ms. That’s an 89% improvement, just from a single config change.

Anyway, small changes make huge impacts - just be patient