PrestaShop v1.6.1.1 Tips – How to Speed Up Your PrestaShop Store
What is PrestaShop?
PrestaShop is a free, open source e-commerce solution. The software is published under the Open Software License. It is written in the PHP programming language with support for the MySQL database management system. PrestaShop is a simple, useful and light e-commerce solution with its obvious advantages.
How to Speed Up Your PrestaShop Store
Check that your template engine Smarty is properly configured
- Go to your admin panel and click on the “Preferences” tab, then “Performance”, look at the “Smarty” section
- Check that “Force compile” is set to false
- Check that “Cache” is set to true
Enable CCC (Compress, Combine, Cache)
- Go to your admin panel and click on the “Preferences” tab, then “Performance”, look at the “CCC (Combine, Compress and Cache)” section
- Enable everything except the “High risk HTML compression”
Encrypt Your Cookies
- Go to your admin panel and click on the “Preferences” tab, then “Performance”, look at the “Ciphering” section
- Select “Ridjnael” instead of “Blowfish”
Switch to The New Directory Tree for Pictures
- Go to your admin panel and click on the “Preferences” tab, then “Images”, look at the “Move images” section
- As the process can take a while, make sure that your server can run PHP scripts for more than 30 seconds. If you are not sure, ask your hosting provider.
- Click on “Move images”
Create sub-domains for Javascript files and CSS files
- Create a sub-domain js1.mystore.com and ask your hosting provider to direct it to /js/
- Create a sub-domain js2.mystore.com and ask your hosting provider to direct it to /theme/mytheme/js/
- Create a sub-domain css1.mystore.com and ask your hosting provider to direct it to /css/
- Create a sub-domain css2.mystore.com and ask your hosting provider to direct it to /theme/mytheme/css/
- These 4 sub-domains will allow your visitors to load more files at the same time. Basically, a web-browser is limited to 8 parallel downloads. Each sub-domain is adding 8 new parallel downloads, so the total would be 40 (Main domain + 4 sub-domains).
Setup A CDN
You should think globally; your site has to load quickly from everywhere across the globe. That’s why using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) is the most effective to reduce the distance between your server and your visitors.
Merge All Your Small Pictures Into A Big One Using CSS Sprites
Each time your visitors are loading a page from your store, their web-browser has to load about 75 to 100 pictures. Most of these are small decorative pictures which could be easily merged into one big picture called a “CSS Sprite”.
You Need A Better Web Host
If your website remains slow even after optimizing the code, using a caching plugin, and a CDN, it’s time to move to a better web host with faster servers. You might contact your host and ask them why your website is performing slowly on their server, but if they fail to provide you a specific reason, you can be sure that their servers are slow in the first place.
While choosing a new web host, make sure you don’t make the same common mistakes that most beginners do. A few of my favourite web hosts are: ASPHostPortal.com, UKWindowsHostASP.NET, DiscountService.biz. I recently reviewed ASPHostPortal.com and in my opinion they’re the best shared host out there out of the large lot of hosts I’ve tested. If you’re curious as to why I never had to switch to another host.