Boost Your Prestashop Website Speed To Extreme Speeds... See How!

[Programmers Direct]

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.

Edited December 15, 2015 by razaro (see edit history)

[Redfredg]

Very helpfull !!! Thanks William Williamson...

[Programmers Direct]

Great, your welcome.

[HavanA]

I am building new on 1.6 (localhost) and just tried this. In the process of disabling several stats modules I could notice the increase in speed in the BO. I have then uninstalled and deleted them. My BO was sometimes very slow and sometimes it happened that requesting another page in BO took more than 120 seconds, thus resulting in a white error page. That seems to be solved now.

 

In FO I notice the speed as well: with "Smarty cache" off and "force compile" on, the difference seems not so great, but with "Smarty cache" on and "force compile" off it is blazing fast.

 

 

Thanks!

[Dh42]

As a note, you can increase the BO speed by disconnecting the addons store from the backoffice as well. 

[Programmers Direct]

Yes that is very true, i thought that removing unused modules was mentioned sorry if I missed it. Yes deleting unused modules is a great idea as even if their disabled they are requeated when the website if used. I am very happy this helped all of you out. If there is any other things I can write an article about to help out further please give me some ideas and I will write and post them.

[Dh42]

I was responding to the post above. PrestaShop in the back office makes a connection to the addons store to get the recommended modules. You can greatly speed the back office up by disabling this connection. 

[Programmers Direct]

Oh wow, awesome so helpful. Thank you so much for clarifying.. +1

[moy2010]

Yup, there are tons of things you can do to make prestashop faster.

[HairMaker.Gr]

Hello razaro

 

So You said that the disabled modules in your back office effective your speed in front office?

And when you uninstall the disabled modules you earn about 2 sec speed in your front office?

 

I am stuck in 7-8 sec and i looking for a solution to make a speed down of 5 sec.

I have spent lot of hours but still looking the problem.

thanks

[Programmers Direct]

Hello razaro

 

So You said that the disabled modules in your back office effective your speed in front office?

And when you uninstall the disabled modules you earn about 2 sec speed in your front office?

 

I am stuck in 7-8 sec and i looking for a solution to make a speed down of 5 sec.

I have spent lot of hours but still looking the problem.

thanks

 

You must use the profiling tool to see what is taking so much time. For me it was the statistics modules in which I do not use as I use google analytics. Also enabling cache and other performance measures accompanied by a minimal layout design can get you down to 1-5 seconds for sure. I also believe that uninstalling modules that are not used is also beneficial as a disabled front office module still loads data and adds time to loading.

 

I hope this helps,

William

[razaro]

Hello hairmania

 

I just edited post :-) post is by "Programmers Direct"

 

But yeah disabling and also removing modules that you  will never use could help a bit

but that depends, 2 sec could be too much.

 

I suggest  you open new topic and have detailed explanation of your problem.

Give as much info you can, like what type of server your site is on, what PrestaShop version,

what things you already tried... and so on

[HairMaker.Gr]

Hello 

thanks for your reply and your answers.

i will open new topic.

Thanks

[Logical IT]

Also don't overlook web hosting providers. Your hosting provider maybe slowing down your site. I recently moved a client of mine to another shared hosting provider and we were able to achieve a 10 point increase in Google speed test by simply changing hosting providers.

[mecollectibles]

On 12/16/2015 at 11:56 AM, Dh42 said:

As a note, you can increase the BO speed by disconnecting the addons store from the backoffice as well. 

How is it possible in PS 1.5.6.0 ?