I would probably take this a step further, and bring it down to a single query. Since this is some kind of index page, and those are more or less read only, I would create a view in the database, and use that to fetch the orders and the related tables.

Excuse my old school way of writing JOINS in SQL. This is just an example not an exact rendition of the table and fields used in the video

CREATE VIEW order_index_views AS
SELECT o.id, o.placed_at, oi.product_id, p.name, u.name, u.email
FROM orders o,
            order_items oi,
            products p,
			users u
WHERE o.id = oi.order_id
AND oi.product_id = p.id
AND o.user_id = u.id;

Then I would create a Model for the view called OrderIndexView

And in the controller do

$orderItems = OrderIndexView::orderBy('placed_at')->paginate(50);

This approach will give me a single query, and it will prevent the loading of fields you don't use, and that solves the N+1 and saves memory.

The only issue with this approach, is that you can't really use the nice syntax of the Schema Builder, you need to use a DB:statement to create and drop the view.

If you want more information about how to create and use views in your database, you can check this post out.

https://tray2.se/posts/use-a-view-instead-of-a-complex-eloquent-query-in-your-laravel-application

Death By N+1 Queries