Did you know that Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO) along with his IT team used to compare the loading speed of their top competitors every morning to check if they were two times faster than the 2nd best competitor? The E-commerce market is very competitive and is growing faster day by day. This means that the speed of your E-commerce site is very important as it will determine your site’s performance because customers do not visit a site that takes too much time to load.
PrestaShop is a popular open-source platform created using PHP for creating E-commerce websites. It can be the most promising platform for your online store as PrestaShop has many advanced features and benefits. The process of optimizing your website is a very technical and burdensome task. If you are already using PrestaShop for your website, then you should know which tools or methods PrestaShop provides to improve site performance. Check the below-mentioned techniques to increase the speed of your PrestaShop store.
Tips to increase the speed of your PrestaShop E-commerce store
1. The 3 C’s: Combine Compress and Cache
CCC method will play a major role to improve the speed of your website as it compresses CSS and JavaScript into a single line of code and gets rid of any unwanted white space and characters by combining and caching them. As a result of this, your file size will decrease and your web pages will load faster.
In the admin panel, go to “Preferences” → “Performance” → “CCC”. Select everything except “High-risk HTML compression”.
2. Check the proper configuration of the template engine ‘Smarty’
Configuring Smarty settings play a major role in boosting the speed of your online store. The Performance page of the PrestaShop 1.6 back office easily stores all of the implemented optimization settings. You may get to the Performance page by first logging into PrestaShop’s Back Office and then going to Advanced Parameters.
In the admin panel, click on “Preferences” → “Performance” → “Smarty”
Check “Force Compile” is set to false and “Cache” is set to true.
3. Setup a CDN
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is the most operative way to shorten the time it takes for a website to load between the server and the client. So set up the CDN and input media service information into PrestaShop. Your static assets will be cached across the content delivery network’s global network of edge servers. As a result, rather than going to the origin server every time, a visitor’s request gets forward to the CDN’s nearest edge server.
4. Use the latest version of PHP
PrestaShop is created in PHP, so it is advisable to use the latest version of PHP to increase the speed and performance. PHP 7 is the latest version of PHP and so it is recommended to install this version as in terms of performance, it is a significant upgrade.
5. Caching system
It is very much important to implement a cache module as it reduces the page load time and server load time by several seconds because delivering cached files consumes insignificant resources. PrestaShop has an inbuilt caching system that speeds up the loading time of your site. You can also install additional 3rd party applications like Memcached, XCache, JPresta Page Cache, APC, etc.
6. Uninstall any unused modules
PrestaShop v1.7 has a variety of modules and features but you would not need each of them all the time. So it is a better idea to remove them so that they do not get load and ultimately your site’s loading speed and performance will increase.
Interesting Read: PrestaShop 1.6 v/s PrestaShop 1.7: The Notable Differences
7. Optimize the database and product image
If your website has a lot of traffic then you should optimize your data from time to time. The ‘PrestaShop Database Optimization Module’ is free and you can use it for this purpose. Other than this, you can also try ‘Percona Server’ or ‘MariaDB’ rather than using MySQL to efficiently improve the scalability. Furthermore, the speed and performance of your website also get affected by the size and qualities of the images. Hence to get maximum results, you can optimize them. There are various tools available to recognize and remove problematic images from your website.
8. Speed testing tools
After performing all the above processes to increase your site speed, you also need to know what progress you have made by checking the loading speed of your website. Many speed testing tools are available out there that regularly runs test, evaluate your website’s performance, indicates the areas for improvement and ensure that the site operates at a normal speed.
Closing thoughts
PrestaShop is a very advanced, reliable, and useful platform for developing an E-commerce site. You just have to work on optimizing your site for its efficient performance. The above-mentioned 8 super-efficient strategies offer your online shopping interface the much-needed performance boost and are primarily geared at enhancing the speed of your PrestaShop store.
We at iCreative Technologies would be happy to help you with your site optimization. We can provide you with PrestaShop Development services with accurate solutions to increase your site speed and performance. Contact us for any type of support you require.
Jainesh Shah
Jainesh Shah is a CEO and Co-Founder of iCreative Technologies Inc. iCreative Technologies is a digital eCommerce agency mainly serving B2B clients across the globe. With over 15 years of experience in technology and business, he is helping his client thrive in this competitive era. He is specialized in eCommerce consulting, creative thinking, generating new business ideas, and delivering end products to market in the digital space. He is working with the vision to help his partner agencies and Clients to grow in their respective businesses.
