Prestashop optimalisation

Prestashop is currently the most widely used open source shopping cart package. Prestashop is easy to understand and easy to install. Unfortunately, sometimes PrestaShop has speed issues and server pages too slowly. This decreases user experience and may even cost customers In this article we will discuss hwo to speed up your prestatshop installation for faster loading pages.
This article is assumes advanced knowledge of PHP, the web server, the Unix shell and HTML but might also be helpful for more inexperienced users.

Prestashop cache settings and performance

Prestashop has a number of different caching mechanisms waaromder smarty caching with code compression. Smarty caching ensures that the loose and slow smarty templates converted into pure php code that can be quickly served by the server. Compression ensures that the html code is smaller and can be sent more quickly.

The following options give the best performance of the web.

Compiling force: choose No
Cache: select yes
Smart cache for CSS : choose Use CCC for CSS
Smart cache for JavaScript" choose Use CCC for Java Script
Minify HTML: choose Minify HTML after smarty compile execution
Compress inline JavaScript in HTML : choose Compress inline JavaScript in HTML after smarty compile execution
High risk HTML compression: choose Keep W3C validation (since pages that do not validate display shower in a browser)

APC is a faster alternative for memcached

Prestashop has a built-in caching feature. This cache file can be saved on disk or in memory (using memcached). We recommend using APC since APC is often a faster alternative to memcached. APC stores compiled PHP files in the memory of the server saving costly processor cycles (and time). Memcached just stores information to memory.

Fast hardware makes the difference

Most PrestaShop installation run on a shared hosting account. With shared hosting one server may serve a hundred or even thousands of websites. The costs are low but the performance is often low so at peak hours PrestaShop performance will degrade. If your PrestaShop a serious source of income we recommend a good hosting provider. A fast managed server is often a good choice to dramatically speed up a prestashop intallation. Another cheaper alternative is a virtual server. A virtual server is a server that does not physically exist but runs on a larger server alongside other virtual servers. Processor power, memory and hard disks will be shared with other users.

Avoid using modules when possible

In prestashop modules may be turned on and off. PrestaShop modules provide great flexibility for a programmer to build functionality without touching the main system itself (prestashop) . The disadvantage of modules is that they are often slow since the system has to start more tasks per page. Common PrestaShop modules such as website links, manufacturers etc are easy to replace and perform much faster in the static html templates.

Ajax search may slow down prestashop

Prestashop uses a temporary mysql table with all possible search words. This table may grow huge in a larger store. Ajax search asks more of the server then a normal search. For a search of 20 characters your browser will query the server not once but twenty times. For very large sites with many products, this is enough to significantly slow down the site. If PrestaShop is very slow, this is a good place to start searching. Ask the server administrator to install 'mytop'. If mytop shows that many queries use PS_search_words and PS_search_index the search table is probably the bottleneck.

Let the server do what it does best!

Apache (the web server that is probably used) is good at serving dynamic content such as the pages of PrestaShop. Apache is not very good at serving static content such as images, css and javascript. Apache by default is not configured properly for prestashop. Ask the server administrator to add and 'expires header' for static content. For popular sites, we recommend using nginx as a reverse caching proxy for static content

How long do you track your visitors

Prestashop users can choose to keep statistics about their users. If these statistics are kept on the database can grow tremendously and eventually slow down the entire site. a good alternative to prestashop statistics is google analytics. Make sure you do not use the 'slow' analytics module. The best implementation is to add the analytics code directly to the head if the template. The file you need to adjust this is header.tpl.

MySQL is often not configured properly for prestashop

Mysql is the database whereprestashop stores all its data. By default mysql is not configured properly for a PrestaShop installation. Running prestashop on a standard mysql database may result in too much disk usage since mysql has to create temporary tables on disk. To improve and speed up PrestaShop install mysqltuner, follow the instructions and implement the suggested settings.

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