PrestaShop optimization is crucial for increasing conversion rates and, as a result, boosting sales on your online store. This is because today, if an e-commerce platform is to attract customers, it needs to run quickly and flawlessly. Read what you can do to speed up your PrestaShop store!

What you will learn from this article:

An online store that loads fast as lightning is a real magnet for customers. Read our article to better understand that:

1. Site speed translates into better conversions,
2. You can easily check the performance of your online store with one tool,
3. Speeding up the store can be taken care of in many ways - some of which you can apply yourself,
4. A fast online store is not enough, SEO efforts also count.

Why does website speed matter?

The times when online stores were few and far between, and consumers were happy to have the opportunity to shop online at all, are irretrievably gone. Today Page loading speed and clear UX are the same elements in the fight for consumer attention, such as sales, promotions, and influencer partnerships.

It is not enough for an online store to appear in search results. It has to work instantly, because even a slight delay will cause the buyer to move on to the competition, where he can buy the same goods at a similar price, but faster. This challenge takes on a whole new dimension when we are talking about large online stores that offer hundreds of different products and their Google's sitemap consists of thousands of URLs.

What does Google say about website loading times? According to the developers of the American giant Simply increasing the page load time from 1 second to 3 seconds is enough to increase the rejection rate (bounce rate) o 32%. If this time is increased from 1 to 5 seconds, the bounce rate increases to 90%. At 10 seconds it rises to 123%. Importantly, the statistics apply to sites on mobile devices, which generally have weaker hardware than desktops. Today, however, the dominant philosophy is Mobile First - More and more people are browsing the web on smartphones.

How to measure the speed of a website?

Before you start implementing any optimization measures, check how fast your site is running. The easiest way to accurately measuring the speed of a website is Google PageSpeed Insights. It's a family of Google tools that allow you to evaluate different kinds of parameters, like:

1. Largest Contentful Paint - time to render the largest content in the browser window,
2. Cumulative Layout Shifts - determines the frequency with which users experience changes in the various layout elements that make up a website,
3. Interaction to Next Paint - defines the responsiveness of a page in response to interactions from the user, such as a mouse click.

PageSpeed will not give you exact information about what should be done, but will allow to identify weaknesses concerning the site. W 4Pixel We use professional DebugBear software to accurately identify website performance problems.

It's also a good idea to look at the server capabilities and service provided by your hosting provider, and for large sites, have your SEO audited for technical issues. However, you can implement many measures on your own. Regardless of your site's technical prowess, keep in mind that user indicators (User Indicators), such as the daily number of users, are critical for e-commerce. They are the ones that really show whether a site is attracting interest.

If you want to check whether the site actually runs smoothly, open the store's mobile site in the Google Chrome browser. You can say that this is the ultimate test of the site's speed.

How do you take care of speeding up your website?

Optimization of an online store on PrestaShop can speed up your site's loading speed and increase user satisfaction. Where should you start?

Image optimization

From a browser's point of view, the volume of data is of great importancewhich must be downloaded from the server. For the purposes of an online store, as a rule, you do not need images with a resolution higher than Full HD, but it is not only about pixels here, but also the size (weight) of the photo.

Use PrestaShop's built-in compression tools to optimize your photos. Consider changing the format of your images to WebP. This is a modern graphic format that provides better compression both lossy and lossless. WebP-formatted photos can be up to 50% lighter than files of equivalent resolution, but saved in JPG format.

Database optimization in PrestaShop

PrestaShop, by default, collects various types of statistics that can overload databases. Especially for online stores with a large assortment, it is worth taking care of regular database cleaning in PrestaShop. Pay attention to the tables:

1. ps_connections,
2. ps_connection_source,
3. ps_guest,
4. ps_page_viewed.

In the first place, turn off the collection of statistics at all if the data is collected by external analytics software. Sometimes modifications to the PHP or HTML source code may be needed.

Removal of additional modules and elements

Software PrestaShop can be equipped with a number of optional modules designed to enhance the platform's capabilities. Loading the necessary data, as well as managing it, engages resources, which can cause the page to load too slowly. The same goes for connecting your store to social media. Every additional element you don't use puts unnecessary strain on the site. The best solution here is minimalism.

PrestaShop - cache cleaning

A good idea to speed up your PrestaShop-based store is to regularly clean the cache. The memory stores information on various types of changes made to the system, data on the number of visitors to the site and more.

In most cases you don't need them, while they effectively "clog up" working memory. You can use the module for this purpose to cleaning memories Or do it manually from the "Advanced" tab, "Performance" and "Clear cache."

Smart cache management

To reduce the loading time of your online store, you can store some of the data in a cache so that it is available immediately. This way you don't have to download them from the server each time. For this purpose, you can use, for example free tools LightSpeed Cache. When designing stores, we reach for this very solution to reduce the server load and increase the speed of the site.

Take advantage of lazy loading

Lazy loading is a technique that postpones the loading of certain page elements until they are needed. If your store has many products in a category view that won't fit on one viewport, lazy loading allows you to speed up the loading of your website, since not all data needs to be loaded at once.

CCC functionality

Functionality option CCC relies on caching of CSS files (cascading style sheets used to describe a website) and JavaScript scripts. If the server is based on system Apache, it is also possible to enable optimization in this area. These files are compressed and merged into one file.

Turn off or optimize the search engine

Today it's hard to imagine an online store without a product search tool. The more elaborate it is, the easier it is to locate the product. Good search engines, those that are extensive and work efficiently, can significantly increase the conversion rate. However, when the search engine:

1. works slowly,
2. shows erroneous results,
3. displays mismatched results - users will avoid using such a platform.

So you have two options to choose from. You can disable the search module completely to increase the speed of your online store. Such a method works well for small e-commerce and requires clear categorization and subcategorization so that customers have no problem locating products.

The second solution is search engine optimization:

1. range of searches,
2. scope limits,
3. context of the inquiry.

This will help the search engine generate accurate and correct results. However, it will still put a strain on the search engine. If you want to implement a robust and fast search system, use ready-made plugins like Doofinder, Amazing Filter, or Advanced Search Pro.

To improve page load time on Presta, you can do much more. It's worth considering, for example, application acceleration or "warming up memories handy", that is, the generation of pages in the background by the server. However, these are advanced activities that may require not only excellent knowledge of the platform, but also programming skills. Such work is worth outsourcing to professionals.

Site optimization vs PrestaShop positioning

Improving the performance of a PrestaShop store also includes various kinds of activities in terms of SEO. If your site is to be positioned in Google's browser, care should be taken to support mechanisms to improve the positioning of your store so that it becomes visible to your customers and Google's robots. Here the possibilities are also quite a lot and it is relatively easy to implement individual recommendations.

Note: SEO efforts will not make your store load faster. They will, however, make your site rank higher in Google rankings. According to the site FirstPageSage In 2025, as many as 39.8% users choose the first result displayed in the SERP (top 1). The next positions look much less impressive:

1. item 2 - 18.7%,
2. item 3 - 10.2%,
3. item 4 - 7.2%,
4. item 5 - 5.1%.

Concerns about The impact of AI Overview on the drop in CTR proved to be largely unjustified. The new functionality accumulates information from the first 3 to 5 top search results.

In short - if you want your store to be visible online and selected more often than your competitors, it is worth fighting for high results in Google.

Friendly URLs

Within the online store take care of friendly URLs - free of unnecessary elements. In the preferences panel, simply set the function "friendly address URL". It is important to do this even before the launch of the online store. Changing URLs for an already functioning platform will cause the site to temporarily lose its earned ranking.

Check the semantics of the page

The semantics of a web page is nothing more than a way of labeling its various elements in the source code. It affects the way Google bots understand code websites and increase its readability. Semantics includes two essential elements:

1. HTML semantics - sections such as
   ,
2. Semantics of headings - H-heading tagging should be done separately for each subpage, including category descriptions and product sheets.

Take care of the title tag

Search engine algorithms distinguish two meta tags -. meta title, which is important from an SEO point of view, and meta description that serves a descriptive and advertising function. Presta allows you to configure the meta title to make it more relevant. Remember to set the title tag for:

1. home page,
2. Category pages,
3. product page.

Disable indexing for unnecessary pages

If you want to gain customers mainly through organic results, it is important to remember that in the search engine should appear primarily on the home page, possibly subpages with products. Page content containing terms and conditions, RODO policies, or shipping terms are unlikely to be of interest to users, so it's a good idea to exclude them from indexation. To do this, simply set the "No" option in the settings field of a particular page for search engine indexation.

Take care of the sitemap

PrestaShop generates sitemap in .xml format. Remember to report it to Google Search Console. In this way you enable Google bots to crawl your site efficiently. The whole indexing process is automatic, but you should monitor it from time to time and fix indexing problems. Directly in Presta, you can exclude certain subpages from the map, as well as indicate how often your store will be updated.

Set canonical links

Configuration of canonical links is of great importance when your online store has many categories and subcategories. Imagine that you sell running shoes from different manufacturers. When optimizing them, you'll be using largely the same phrases, so it's worth suggesting the following algorithms Google, to display the category homepage as canonical. In this way, you will avoid duplicate content on your website.

Use analytics tools

Although Google Analytics is not directly used to measure site speed, it allows you to monitor traffic within your site. This makes it possible to implement measures that aim to improve the visibility of the site on the web.

Implement the blog module

Having an online store blog allows you to pursue several goals at once. On the one hand, in this way you build your image as an expert and can convince web users to choose your goods or services. On the other hand, thanks to the blog, it is possible to build consistent internal linking, which affects the search engine indexing results of the site.

Enable SSL

Today, the Secure Socket Layer protocol is the gold standard of websites.. It provides a secure connection between the browser and the server, protecting data such as passwords and payment card numbers. As of 2014, Google uses encryption SSL as one of the ranking factors. So by keeping security high, you can increase your browser ranking.

Although protocol SSL to some extent affects page load time due to the need to encrypt/decrypt data, the differences are not significant. You can also optimize this technology by, among other things, reaching for the latest version of the SSL/TLS, minimizing the number of data exchanges between infrastructure elements (handshakes), or choosing HTTP/2 protocol.

How can we help you?

When you run an online store through which you generate most of your revenue, you should take care of its efficiency. Sometimes using popular CMS and ready-made templates is easy, but not always. Sometimes you also just want to stand out from the competition. The 4Pixel team is made up of experienced specialists, who for more than a decade have established, developed and maintained the stores on PrestaShop platform. If you want your website to run faster, take advantage of our support. We combine comprehensive web development, web development and SEO services to support our clients.