At this year’s Laracon, Taylor Otwell, the framework’s creator and founder, shed light on some of the latest Laravel features. But what do they mean for business owners who chose to build their websites using that framework?

Let’s look at the most important features of Laravel 5.5 LTS from the perspective of your business.

Improving UX with Laravel Horizon

Laravel Horizon, although not included in the 5.5 release, is a package coming out along with the latest Laravel. Horizon’s task is to help developers manage the jobs queues better and increase the performance of your web application.

Key features of Horizon:

• Auto-Balancing
• Code-Driven Configuration
• Dashboards and Metrics
• Queue Monitoring
• Failed Job Management
• Notifications
• Open-Source Software

All right, so how exactly can Horizon help your web app’s UX?

Say your prospect wanted to subscribe to your newsletter, but the request didn’t go through. Moreover, the queues were set up in a way that made the website slower during that particular process (everything was loading at the same time). What you’re left out with is a prospect disappointed with the UX of your site and that prospect’s lost subscription request.

With the Horizon package, such situations should cease to happen.

The Auto-Balancing feature will make sure that the subscription request, or any other server-consuming request, is not interfering with the user experience. The feature’s main job is to maintain a balance between available workers (your server resources) and demanding queues (user requests) without the need for the dev’s supervision.

Horizon will also let your developers know that there’s been a request that didn’t go through, giving them a chance to find and fix it, and, for example, retain your prospect’s email.

Another useful feature of Horizon is Notifications.

During increased activity on your website, for example, seasonal sales or introduction of long-awaited products or services, your designated developers will get a notification that there are certain queues which are causing server overload, thus affecting your website UX. After receiving such a notification, your dev will be able to act instantly and direct more workers to the job at hand.

And here’s what Taylor Otwell had to say about Horizon:

“I built Horizon to scratch my own itch. I need deep insight into my queue throughput, performance, wait times, failures. And, when a customer has a problem, Horizon allows me to quickly find the job that failed.”

Main Takeaway: Adding Horizon to your web application gives you a chance to improve user experience, add speed to your app, and control failed requests in a way that lets you fix them faster.

Correcting Errors with Whoops

Whoops came pre-installed in Laravel 4, but ever since Laravel 5.0, the error handler was removed. Until now.

Essentially what Whoops does is underline errors in the code. Developers surely appreciate it, and on the business side of things, it might shorten the delivery time. After all, it’s a lot easier to fix mistakes in the code when you immediately see them on the page rather than during testing.

Main Takeaway: By catching the mistakes right there on the page, Whoops can help your developers implement changes to the code faster.

Easier Branding with Mailables

With older releases of Laravel, creating and viewing custom email layouts were a bit of a hassle. In the 5.5 release, however, this process has been simplified. Now you can implement branded CSS theme files directly into the code from the point of your browser. You can also configure your different email templates and themes to suit particular messages best.

Main Takeaway: Mailables helps you implement branded email templates that align with your company’s design, keeping messages to your customers in tune with your website.

Developing Front-End with Presets

Laravel 5.5 gives developers a chance to choose their front-end scaffolding without resolving to the default one. This new feature makes it easier for the developers to create the front-end in a framework or library they feel the most skilled in.

Familiar with the front-end environment, the developers are better equipped to deal with any errors and glitches should they occur.

Main Takeaway: Giving your devs familiar front-end library or framework can improve the delivery time and execution of any front-end changes in the code.

Laravel was developed to make it easier and faster for devs to add the routine parts of their apps to the code. This gives them more time and space for the creative differentiations of web applications. With the latest release of Laravel, the developing process and the delivery time should improve significantly.