Assignment on the Best Ways to Optimise PrestaShop Speed

Online shopping is undoubtedly more convenient than traditional brick-and-mortar stores. But still, people want to make their virtual shopping experience quick. In fact, they experience immediate responses when they make clicks on the web. They don’t like to wait and if they have to wait, they will just leave the online platform. Therefore, online shopping stores focusing on speed and response timing make more sales.

If you make the use of PrestaShop for your online store, there are a number of ways you can enhance its performance. In this guide, you will get to know some simple ways for PrestaShop optimisation.

Tips for PrestaShop Optimisation: Actually, PrestaShop is an open platform that can be used by anyone for creating their online store. It is written in PHP and is quite popular for websites because of its large number of add-ons. Following are some simple tips you can consider for your PrestaShop optimisation:

1.      Delete Unused Modules: One way of dealing with slow PrestaShop is to delete unused modules. Generally, PrestaShop 1.7 seems to come with various modules and features that you do not need. Uninstall and delete all modules that you do not use. In this way, these modules will not be loaded and they will not slow down your PrestaShop.

2.      Use PrestaShop Add-Ons: When it comes to modules, there are several add-ons available in the PrestaShop store you can use to speed up your PrestaShop. In fact, they enable you to enhance its performance. With such tools, you can implement Prestashop image optimisation and lazy loading to improve your user experience. For image optimisation, you can make the use of Re-Smush PrestaShop add-on.

3.      Optimise your Database: You can try MariaDB or Percona Server for your database instead of the standard MySQL for better scalability. You can even utilise an individual server for your MySQL if you online store is always loaded with traffic.

Even when you have optimised your database, you should keep it in mind to keep optimising it every now and then for better performance.

4.      Use Latest PHP Version: Upgrading to or installing the latest PHP version could bring some significant speed improvements to PrestaShop. For instance, in comparison with PHP 5, PHP 7 is a significant upgrade.

5.      Invest in CDN: You should take advantage of CDN or content delivery network for speeding up your content delivery. When it is set up, you should just input information about media service into PrestaShop. Your static assets will be cached by a content delivery network across its edge servers over the world. In this manner, request of a visitor can be routed to the nearest edge server in contrast with traveling to the main server.

6.      Double your Web Servers: When you need to select a web server, you have two obvious options in the form of Apache and Nginx. Each of these options has its own drawbacks and benefits. You can just use both of them. When you utilise both of these servers, it will make up for their deficiencies. A common approach to this combination is to place Apache in the back of Nginx. Nginx should be used as a reverse proxy. In this manner, it will be capable of handling every static content request while Apache will handle dynamic requests.

7.      Select a PrestaShop Module: There are a number of PrestaShop modules that you can implement to improve the performance of your store. In fact, the significance of implementing a PrestaShop cache module or PrestaShop speed module cannot be ignored. You can invest in options such as Page Cache Ultimate Module and JPresta Page Cache for improved PrestaShop page cache. Other than just decreasing load times by several seconds, they can even decrease your sever load because minimal resources are consumed in delivering cached files.

You have the option of choosing PrestaShop speed up module. Although these modules are different from each other. They ultimately result in better performance of your store.

8.      Combine, Compress, and Cache: This option will serve to compress all your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS into a single code. Therefore, it will get rid of unnecessary characters and whitespace. In this manner, the size of your files will be smaller and it will enable your pages to load faster. You should look for the Advanced Preferences tab under the top menu bar to click on Performance. Lastly, enable the option of CCC.

Tools for Testing Speed: One of the most important things to consider when you want to improve the speed of your store is to know and make the use of speed testing tools. Most people continue to invest efforts in improving the speed of their stores but they do not know whether their efforts are paying off or not. You cannot know if your efforts are even paying off until you know how to quantify your gains. Fortunately, there are different speed testing tools that can help you evaluate the performance of your website. The best thing about these tools is that do not only analyse your store but they also identify all the areas that are lacking and require improvement. Whichever tool you select, you should run tests on a regular basis for making sure that you are operating at the best and your desired level of speed.

Evaluating your Success: Your bottom line is the most important metric. You need to think whether your optimisation efforts are driving more sales or not. Although the speed of website is the most critical factor to the success of an online store, it is still one of the many factors. The layout of your website, your products, and your prices are all important components of your business. Still, if customers have to wait a few minutes for obtaining their desired results, they are more likely to consider other websites or platforms for purchasing what they want. Thus, enhancing the speed of your site is definitely going to generate greater returns for you.