Eloquent performance optimization tips?

Hey everyone, I'm pretty new to Laravel development and I've been spending a lot of time reading up on common pitfalls. One thing that keeps coming up is the issue of slow Eloquent queries, especially the notorious N+1 problem, which sounds like it can really cripple an application's performance if not handled early. I'm trying to be proactive from the very beginning of my projects and ensure I'm building things with good Laravel performance optimization in mind, rather than fixing problems down the line.

So, as a complete beginner, what are some of the most straightforward, beginner-friendly ways or tools you'd recommend to identify and prevent N+1 queries? Beyond that, are there any general tips for effective database optimization within Laravel that a newbie like me should absolutely know from the get-go to avoid common database inefficiencies? Anyone faced this before?