How to Speed Up PrestaShop: 8 Ways to Optimize Speed | eMagicOne
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How to Speed Up PrestaShop: 8 Ways to Optimize Your Website’s Speed

Fast PrestaShop website is crucial for your website conversion and SEO, while speedy back office ensures effective store management. In this article, we’ve assembled the solutions that can speed up the website and deal with the slow PrestaShop admin.

How to Optimize PrestaShop Speed

The performance of your store depends on a number of factors: site optimization, how many products you have, whether you are on the shared or your own server, and many other.

Therefore, there is a list of methods to address each factor and accomplish PrestaShop speed up. Let’s check the most common and accessible of them.

Latest PHP Version

Try using the latest PHP versions. In the PrestaShop documentation, they suggest using PHP 8.1 when possible.

Enable the Combine, Compress and Cache Settings

Check PrestaShop system configurations and set the compression, combining, and caching of Java Script CSS and HTML files to “Yes”. These settings will reduce your website size so that the browser will transfer the content in a much faster way.

PrestaShop Performance CCC

Configure Smarty Settings

There are a few more options that when enabled can improve your web store performance. You can find them in PrestaShop back office => Advanced Parameters => Performance:

  • In the Template compilation drop-down, it is recommended to select the “Never recompile template files” option (enable this setting only in case no changes are being made to the current design.)
  • Set Cache to “Yes”.
  • Cache type – select “File System”, not “MySQL”.
  • Clear cache every time something is modified: this configuration will clear cache after any modification is made and will let your customers see the latest changes applied to your website.

PrestaShop Smarty Settings

Consider Dedicated Hosting

The hosting provider you are using for your website is not less important when talking about PrestaShop speed up. Sharing one server with other websites can slow down your load speed in a huge way. Therefore, the best option would be to choose dedicated hosting.


Remove Unused Images from Your Server

Keeping a large number of unused files on the server can also be the cause of slow PrestaShop performance. Using the Store Diagnostics tool with Store Manager for PrestaShop you can define the images that exist on the server but don’t have records in the database and therefore, are not linked to any product.

After running the diaagnistocs, you’ll see a list of images that are not assigned to any product (see the screenshot below). You can remove them all at once by pressing “Delete Images” on the toolbar.


PrestaShop Store Manager Store Diagnostics Unassigned Images

If you don’t have Store Manager installed yet, download the free trial version and install it on your computer. Connect the application to your store database following the instruction.

Set Up CDN

A content delivery network is a system of servers that deliver content to web users based on their geographic location. This way, after a user sends a request to enter a web page, it will be accepted by the nearest server. There are different CDN providers out there. One of the popular ones is Cloudflare.


Optimize Image Size

Large images are slowing down page load and eating up server space. To configure image optimization options, go to Design => Image Settings and configure JPEG and PNG compression, product image height and width, generation of high-resolution images, and other settings.


PrestaShop Optimize Image Settings

Make sure you are not scaling images with HTML. Instead, use compression tools or image editors to reduce the size of your images with no damage to their quality.

Also, avoid putting a big number of pictures on one page. You should better distribute them among different pages.


Get Rid of Unnecessary Modules

PrestaShop installation includes activation of a huge list of additional modules. Check this list by going to Modules => Module Manager and disable or uninstall the ones you do not use.


PrestaShop Module Manager

Want to speed up other aspects of PrestaShop store management? Check our articles on PrestaShop product import and Mass Product Changer tool.

Wrapping Up

Good website performance requires constant control and optimizing actions. It is rather impossible to improve site speed once for all. The above-listed methods are the most effective, so make sure to apply at list the most accessible ones.

If you are aware of any other PrestaShop speed optimization measures, share them with us in the comments.



Try Store Manager for PrestaShop to Fix Image and SEO Issues Free Download






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