Fixing Livewire Wizard Bugs: How Removing wire:key Improved Our Multi-Step Form Stability

The Bug That Made No Sense

We were deep in development on a new quote request wizard for AustinsElite—a Laravel 12–powered platform where users step through a dynamic form to get personalized service pricing. Everything looked solid: components were scoped, state was managed, and navigation worked… until it didn’t.

Users started reporting that after clicking "Next" on certain steps, they’d suddenly see two of the same form sections stacked on top of each other. Sometimes it was subtle—duplicate radio button groups. Other times, entire steps rendered twice. Worse, the duplicated state would persist, making validation unpredictable and submission unreliable.

At first glance, it looked like a state hydration issue. Maybe we were mutating data incorrectly? Or not handling Livewire’s lifecycle hooks properly? I spent a full afternoon stepping through $wire calls, checking updated() methods, and auditing event dispatches. Nothing.

Then I noticed a pattern: duplication only happened when navigating forward, never backward. And it always occurred on steps that had wire:key set.

The Real Culprit: Over-Optimization

I’ll admit it—I added those wire:key attributes with the best intentions. We’d been burned before by Livewire re-rendering components unnecessarily, so I thought: Let’s help Livewire out. Let’s give it a stable key so it knows what’s what.

So I slapped wire:key="step-{{ $currentStep }}" onto each step’s wrapper, thinking I was being smart. Turns out, I was just getting in the way.

Livewire already tracks component state and DOM diffs intelligently. When you introduce a wire:key, you’re telling Livewire: “This chunk of DOM is tied to this key—don’t reuse it, don’t merge it, treat it as unique.” That’s great when you’re looping over dynamic data (like @foreach ($items as $item)), but in a single, linear wizard where only one step is shown at a time? It’s overkill.

Here’s what was actually happening:

User is on Step 1 (wire:key="step-1").
Click "Next" → Step 2 loads (wire:key="step-2").
Livewire sees a new key and creates a fresh DOM node.
But due to how the conditional rendering was structured (using @if($currentStep == 2)), the old Step 2 node wasn’t being cleaned up properly—especially if the user had visited it before.
Result: two Step 2s. Chaos ensues.

The irony? I added wire:key to prevent rendering bugs, and it was the cause of them.

The Fix: Trust the Framework

The solution was counterintuitive: I removed every wire:key from the step wrappers.

Just. Deleted. Them.

No extra logic. No custom cleanup. No forced re-renders. I let Livewire do what it’s designed to do—track state and diff the DOM efficiently without my "help."

One commit, one deploy, and the duplication bug vanished. No more double inputs. No more ghost steps. Just a smooth, predictable flow from step to step.

This wasn’t a Livewire bug. It was a misuse of a powerful tool. And it’s a reminder I needed: not every optimization is an improvement.

Livewire’s automatic diffing is smart. It knows when to preserve, update, or replace nodes. When you add wire:key unnecessarily, you’re opting into manual DOM tracking—without the safety net.

Lessons Learned

Don’t over-key. Only use wire:key when you’re rendering lists or dynamic content that Livewire can’t safely diff on its own. For single, conditional views? Skip it.
Trust the framework’s defaults. Livewire’s internal tracking works because it makes assumptions about how your app behaves. When you override those assumptions without cause, you risk introducing subtle bugs.
Debugging is about questioning your assumptions. I spent hours auditing complex state logic because I assumed the problem was deep. It wasn’t. It was a two-line fix hiding in plain sight—once I stopped assuming I was being clever.

This fix went out in a quiet commit titled "removed redundant wire:key attributes from Livewire component steps"—no fanfare, no drama. But it stabilized one of our most critical user flows.

So if you’re building a multi-step form with Livewire and seeing weird duplication, ghost inputs, or state leaks: check your keys. You might be over-engineering your way into a bug.

Sometimes, the best code is the code you remove.