PrestaShop v1.6.1.1 Tips – How to Speed Up Your PrestaShop Store

PrestaShop v1.6.1.1 Tips – How to Speed Up Your PrestaShop Store

What is PrestaShop?

PrestaShop v1.6.1.1 Tips - How to Speed Up Your PrestaShop StorePrestaShop 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.comUKWindowsHostASP.NETDiscountService.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.

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