How to improve Prestashop website's speed?

Speed is one of the most important factors affecting the sales size of a web-store. According to statistics, online shoppers are not ready to wait more than three seconds for a page to load. If you have a Prestashop website, you need to improve speed of website to help you increase the number of conversions on your site. So how to optimize PrestaShop 1.7 speed? Keep reading in this article!

1. CCC ( Combine, Compress and Cache):

Enable compression, combining and caching of JS, CSS and HTML files. This way the size of the files is smaller, and every web page loads faster.

You can try Page cache module by ETS Soft, Page cache significantly increases the speed of your website by storing all static content in HTML files. The HTML files are immediately displayed to website visitors whenever a page is queried.

Page Cache Pro supports cronjob feature to help you automatically regenerate page cache for smoother user experience on the front office.

2. Configure Smarty Settings: 

You should follow these options below to make your website perform faster:

• Never recompile template files: enable this settings only in case no changes are being made to the current design.
• Set Cache to Yes
• Clear cache every time something is modified: this configuration will clear cache after any modification made and will let your customers see the latest changes applied to your website.

3. PHP version:

Old versions of PHP do not support newer functions your site might need, they are buggy and terribly slow. 

What are the good PHP versions?

Make sure you are not using PHP versions older than 5.5.2. 5.5 and 5.6 are very solid. The best option would be using PHP 7 version which is the latest one.

4. Hosting: 

Sharing one server with other websites can slow down your load speed in a huge way. Naturally, the best option would be to choose dedicated hosting.

5. Optimize image: 

Go to Design => Image Settings and configure JPEG and PNG compression, product image height and width, generation of high-resolution images and other settings. You also use Total Image Optimization Pro module, it  enables you to save 40-60% of the image size but still keep the image quality as the original. You can manually optimize all existing images available on your website (such as product images, product category images, supplier images, etc.) or optimize any image you want by uploading images or browsing your website images. This module provides 3 powerful image optimization methods: reSmush, TinyPNG and PHP optimization script.

6. Uninstall unnecessary module:

Check list  module by going to ‘Modules’ => ‘Modules & Services’ => ‘Installed modules’ and disable or uninstall the ones you do not use.

7. Setting up a CDN:

• It’s especially valuable for websites with visitors spread all across the world
• The usual file types that should be on a CDN are images, videos, CSS, and JS (the largest files)
• Amazon CloudFront is free in the first year of use; you can give it a try

* Useful tip: Install Super Speed module on your Prestashop website. With Super Speed, an all-in-one speed optimization tool for Prestashop, you will have the most innovative speed optimization solutions which lacking in Prestashop by default (for example page cache, image optimization, database optimization, etc.). These solutions will help simplify the default speed optimization process of Prestashop and make your website faster than ever!