The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post today with some easy wins you can update your PHP applications with to gain some overall performance. These five helpful tips cover a few different topics, including some that make use of external tools to provide that extra boost of speed your app may need.

Making your website more performant can require a lot of layers. From setting up a reverse-proxy cache with Varnish to configuring a group of load balancers, there are many well-documented options. What if you're just starting out? What if you have a smaller application? Are there things you can do now that will make difference? This article will explore easy wins for more performant PHP you can implement either as standard practices for your development team or principles you can retrofit for an existing application.

Their five tips involve using:

• At least PHP 5.4
• Autoloading with classmaps
• A reduced amount of memory in classes
• XDebug to do some profiling
• OpCode caching