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Boost your Prestashop website speed to extreme speeds... See how! author: William Williamson Date: 12/09/2015 A few months ago we realized that our site was extremely slow and the website speed was affecting our ability to sell products, provide a great user experience, and effectively convert sales. Admittedly, the speed has only a partial affect on these aspects of ecommerce and a stores ability to sell products, provide a great user experience, and effectively convert sales; however the speed does matter as many websites like kinsta.com - A Beginner’s Guide to Website Speed Optimization, marketingland.com - Page Speed Matters! Why You Need to Improve Yours Today, linkedin.com - The Importance of Website Loading Speed & Top 3 Factors That Limit Website Speed, and many others like them. After reading many, many articles about speed and using two speed test tools the Google Page Speed Insight and GTmetrix, which did give many insights into my issues in which ranged from images to minifying css and js files to load times. Both testers checked for many aspects in which gave specific information related to the loading of the page. GTmetrix was a bit more in-depth than google, but google gave other insight in which was a great asset to the testing process. You can see by the images above and below this paragraph that the reduction was real and as you can see the decrease was steady as improvements were made. However, at some point we hit a dead-end in which I assume many of you do as well. Read below to find out more about how we significantly increased our website speed to sell more products/get more conversions, boost performance and user experience. I bet you really want to know how all of a sudden we had a huge drop in loading time, requests, and page speed... Well, I will tell you... First we searched for hours trying to find out why we were at this dead-end in which our page speed was stuck at or around 8 seconds as the images above also show. After many tedious hours of reading we began to notice that we were loading many things and had many modules installed and some were not even used, but rather disabled, yet still requesting data was ready to show, but still not showing... So very needless in deed and now we are getting to the juicy stuff. So as we have our eureka moment, we begin to run through and uninstall most all disabled modules and we began to get better and even better speeds, but still was not fast enough at maybe 5 to 6 seconds loading time. So we set out to see where else we could shave off more things we did not need. And then we noticed that we had both statistics in Prestashop activated and tracking everything possible in which we had all statistics enabled and also used the handy Google Analytics modules. Now, this is were the magic happened in which we disabled all statistics except some small tracking modules like best category dashboard statistics and removed much of the larger labor intensive statistics modules. We decided to do this because the Google Analytics is more efficient, less server intensive, and flat out a better analytics tool... No offense Prestashop because your modules and ecommerce cart is very well built and maintained. After Making the change we noticed the resulting speeds of around 1 second loading times in which for us was an extremely significant change in which was extremely beneficial to our store and as we are moving into our first week we are seeing very significant progress such as traffic, lower bounce rates, and drop-offs, and a better experience overall. To recap and sum up the article: You can speed up your Prestashop Ecommerce website simply by removing unused modules, many statistics modules and use tools like Google Analytics to perform statistical analysts on your website as it is extremely faster and more efficient. We experienced a 90% decrease in the loading times within the time-frame of this article and its images, but it may differ with each website and the requirements of the website. Hope this helps.

In the following topic I'll list all the prestashop performance tips I've got to know so far, and will add any tip that the prestashop community may suggest. Tip 1.- Activate CCC for CSS and JS in Advanced Parameters - Performance. Tip 2.- Enable Prestashop's Smarty Cache in Advanced Parameters - Performance. Tip 3.- Uninstall any unused module and, if you are using Google Analytics, uninstall also every prestashop stat module. Tip 4.- Adjust image sizes according to your theme's parameters. Tip 5.- Optimize image size by compressing them by using either a free service such as Smush-it or with a paid module such as Smush Optimize Image from PresTeamShop. Tip 6.- Activate a cache system on your server. Tip 7.- Use a module for HTML or MySQL cache. I personally use Joe Martin's Page Cache Module, but another great cache module is Xtendify's Express Cache. Tip 8.- Use either a great shared hosting service for Prestashop such as CloudWays, a VPS Server or a dedicated one depending on your customization and performance needs. Tip 9.- Use CSS Sprites for your static background images. Tip 10.- Move JavaScript files to the bottom by using El Patron's modules JavaPro for Front Office and BoZoom for Back Office. Tip 11.- Clear unused database tabs and entries, you can use RSI's Presta Speed module to achieve this. Tip 12.- Configure ETags according to your needs. You can disable them by adding to your .htaccess file "FileETag None Header unset ETag". Tip 13.- Activate GZip compression for Prestashop following these steps. Tip 14.- Use lazyload to reduce total HTTP requests for images and page's total size: Lazyload for Prestashop. Tip 15.- Minify all of your CSS and JS files if you won't edit them anymore (Keep a copy of these before doing it). Tip 16.- Eliminate all the unnecessary hooked modules from key hooks such as displayLeftColumn, displayRightColumn, displayHome, etc. Tip 17.- Reduce the number of CSS rules and files by using a consistent design throughout all your store.

Hi , i just tried to use server media on performance, i created my sub domain and i put it, but when i'm going to performance section and i add it the result is like the image enclosed, in few words it looks like a site map... how comes? Some ideas? Regards

In the new Prestashop 1.6.0.11 I've found that 2 types of cache are listed: - MySQL - File system How do they differ from each other? Which would bring the biggest performance increment? Thanks in advance .

i am not sure whether my question will appear stupid or not. when i look into the prestashop source codes, i find all these expressive long name of variables, function names, etc., which is really great, as it helps one to understand the inner workings of prestashop. but i am also aware that such long names will, collectively, reduce the loading speed of prestashop? i know that in the javascript world, they use minifiers, uglifiers etc., to reduce the size of the source file in order to improve performance, wouldn't it be the same if we minify the prestashop codebase in the same manner(provided that it still works, of course:)). just a thought, hope to provoke something thinking and get some responses from similar, performance and speed minded prestashop users.

Hello everyone, I am the founder of DareBoost, a service that allows to test a website's performance and quality and give tips for optimization. Our solution is currently available under beta version for free. We have built some specific tips for PrestaShop in our tool (inspired by what we have read on the official page dedicated to the optimization ) We are looking for testers, and also PrestaShop's experts to help us to go further in our optimization tips. Try the tool and test the performance and quality of your site, it will only take you a few seconds : www.dareboost.com Here is a sample of performance report (made ​​for the PrestaShop's demo) Thanks in advance for your feedback. I hope the tool will be useful, and if you have ideas of tips / best practices, we will gladly try to automate them FYI : This project will result in a few weeks on a business creation, but I want to say that we are based on freemium model, so the free version will always be available !

Hi can anyone give me guide or link with a good explanation about Media servers (use only with CCC) how to use it, how it works, how to set the .htaccess, what i should copy, what i should set or some? i need to run myshop faster on reload thanks,

Dear Friends I do not have good idea about how to configuration Prestashop performance correctly. I think most of most of shop owners has this question. Then i decide to start a this topic to talk about Prestashop Performance Configuration. I think this will help us to share valuable knowledge and experience. It will help us to build a better performance Prestashop Store and increase our Sales and Earning. We can see "Configuration checklist" box in our Prestashop Back Office home page (Admin home page) I've attached screenshot to this post. You can see it. It is showing green colour correct symbols, red colour wrong symbols and yellow colour warning symbols. I think colour correct mark symbols will give us a better performance fast loading store. I need good guide to configure this settings and options in "Advanced Parameters > Performance". I want to learn how to configuration features under Smarty, Optional features, Ciphering, and Caching tabs. Then time to start a talk.

Hi friends, I have used cURL code in my prestashop but it is taking too much time to execute that code. I talked with the hosting server and they are telling that the problem is in coding. But same code i have written on different server but its not taking time to execute. I don't know how to solve this problem. Please help me to solve this issue. Below is code.... <?php //INIT $ckfile = tempnam ("/tmp", "CURLCOOKIE"); $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'MY WEBSITE NAME'); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true); $output = curl_exec($ch); print_r($output); $info = curl_getinfo($ch); curl_close($ch); ?> Thank you