Blade is Laravel’s built-in templating engine for creating server-rendered views. Blade files use the .blade.php extension, are typically stored in resources/views, and are compiled into plain PHP that Laravel caches until the template changes.

Blade provides concise syntax for output, control structures, layouts, components, slots, and reusable directives while still allowing plain PHP when necessary. A route or controller commonly returns a Blade view with the view helper and passes it the data needed for rendering.