Speed up my php function - php

Question

I have this code on my website, this function is called on every webpage, but it's slow (I did a lot of research and without this function the TTFB is about 100ms, but with this it can be even 2 seconds).
The function replaces every text in [] to a link, if a match is found in the card database. E.g.: [Inner Fire] >> and the output on the website will be:
<a href/card/id/name" class="quality1">Inner Fire</a>
It's working really great, but there are 3000 cards in the database and this is slow. Anyone can come up with a better solution to speed the process up?
Thank you in advance.
Some clarifications before the code:
sql_query:
function sql_query($conn, $query)
{
return mysqli_query($conn, $query);
}
Similar function with sql_fetch.
char_convert: converts utf-8 characters to HTML entity (decimal)
function coloredcard($text)
{
global $conn;
$query = "SELECT id, quality, name, collectible FROM cards";
$result = sql_query($conn, $query);
while ($card = sql_fetch($result))
{
$name_replace = strtolower(str_replace(str_split("\' "), "-", $card['name']));
if ($card['collectible']!=0) //if collectible, replace [card_names]
{
$from = '['.char_convert($card['name']).']';
$to = ''.$card['name'].'';
$text = str_ireplace($from, $to, $text);
}
elseif ($card['collectible']==0) //if not collectible replace (noncollectible card names)
{
$from = '('.char_convert($card['name']).')';
$to = ''.$card['name'].'';
$text = str_ireplace($from, $to, $text);
}
}
return $text;
}
Please let me know if you need further information.

Answer 1

The best way to accelerate this code will be to limit the number of cards that need to be fetched from the database. I'm not going to write the code for you, but here's an outline of how that could work:
Extract all the card names which are [linked] in the page, e.g. using preg_match_all().
Perform a single SQL query to load all of those cards, using WHERE name IN ('name1', 'name2', 'name3', …).
Loop through the result of that query and perform replacements on the HTML where appropriate.

Answer 2

Just my 2 cents:
You are not going to display 3000+ cards at the same time do you? So why not implementing an infinite loader which requests only a bunch of them (10 or so) and then asks for more as the user scrolls down?
$query = "SELECT id, quality, name, collectible FROM cards LIMIT ".$offset.",10";
Solution no.2:
have another table in which you store which cards are needed on which page, something like:
cardpage(cardid, pageid)
and have a JOIN query between card and cardpage tables

Answer 3

You can use MySQL's own string functions to do the replacement stuff while fetching data, much faster than iterating in PHP:
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/string-functions.html

Answer 4

You're making 3000 calls to str_replace(). You can accomplish the same result in one. See the docs for str_replace(), notably that the first and second parameters can be arrays:
$search = ['things', 'to', 'search', 'for', ... ];
$replace = ['things', 'to', 'replace', 'with', ... ];
$output = str_replace($search, $replace, $input);
Also, cache the output so that you only have to perform the replacement once.