Jason McCreary demonstrates how to dramatically improve Laravel application performance using Cloudflare page caching, using Laravel News as a real-world case study. The discussion reveals that many Laravel apps sit behind Cloudflare but never benefit from page caching due to framework defaults like sessions and middleware. By identifying static pages (like homepages that only change when new content is published), replacing non-reactive Livewire components with cacheable Blade components, and properly configuring Cloudflare's free tier features, applications can see response times drop from hundreds of milliseconds to 40ms while reducing infrastructure costs. The key insight is that large portions of Laravel applications are effectively static and can be cached at the CDN level without major architectural changes.
