You spent weeks (months?) tweaking your PrestaShop store. Clean design, killer categories, modules for reviews, wishlists, upsells, the works. Hit live… and it’s like watching paint dry on a rainy day. Category pages take forever, product detail feels laggy, checkout? Forget it—half your visitors bail before the cart even shows up.
Google’s Core Web Vitals don’t mess around: aim for under 2.5 seconds load time or watch your rankings tank and bounce rates skyrocket. Most PrestaShop stores I see are chilling at 5–15 seconds on mobile. Painful.
So what’s killing your speed? Here are the usual suspects—the ones that show up every single time someone DMs me at 1 a.m. freaking out.
First: Hosting that can’t handle the heat. You picked the budget shared plan because “PrestaShop runs on anything.” Sure, a fresh install with 10 products does. Throw in 5,000+ SKUs, faceted search, multiple languages, currencies, tons of modules hitting the database every page load? Shared hosting chokes. Your Time to First Byte (TTFB) balloons to 1–2 seconds just waiting for PHP/MySQL to wake up.
Move to real muscle: managed PrestaShop hosting, NVMe SSDs, at least 4 GB RAM dedicated per site, PHP 8.1+, OPCache tuned properly, and Redis or Memcached for object caching. Containerized or VPS setups crush shared every time. I’ve seen TTFB drop from 1200 ms to under 200 ms—site feels reborn.
Second: Images straight from a DSLR nightmare. Product photos at 5000×5000 pixels, 5–10 MB each, no compression, no WebP. Category page with 48 products? That’s 200+ MB of images before anything useful renders. Mobile visitor on spotty LTE? They’re closing the tab and buying from someone else.
Compress aggressively (TinyPNG-level), convert to WebP, resize to actual display size, use responsive srcset, and lazy-load everything below the fold. One store I worked on went from 6.8 MB page weight to 1.1 MB—load time cut in half, bounce rate dropped 35%.
Third: Module overload (the PrestaShop classic). You’ve got 60+ modules active. Half are “free” ones from who-knows-where, poorly coded, firing hooks on every page, running extra queries. One bad SEO module or slider can add 300+ database calls per load. PrestaShop’s hook system is powerful… and deadly when overused.
Audit hard: disable everything non-essential, use the built-in profiler (CCC tab or debug mode) to spot slow modules. Keep core ones + proven performers (good caching module, maybe a lightweight page cache). Uninstall the rest—literally delete them from the server. Fewer modules = way fewer headaches.
Fourth: Caching? What caching? PrestaShop rebuilds pages from scratch on every hit—Smarty compilation, database queries, module executions. For a dynamic store, that’s a performance killer.
Enable Smarty cache (force compilation off in production), turn on CCC (Combine, Compress, Cache) for CSS/JS, use a proper page cache module that respects dynamic content (cart, login, etc.), add Redis for smart caching, and slap a CDN on top for static assets. Exclude cart/checkout from aggressive caching or you’ll serve old carts—disaster.
Fifth: Bloated theme from theme-hell. That gorgeous multipurpose theme with 50 demos, 10,000 lines of unused CSS, inline JS everywhere, render-blocking everything? It’s murdering your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).
Switch to a lean, PrestaShop-optimized theme (classic or something stripped-down like a tuned child theme). Minify/combine CSS/JS, defer non-critical scripts, remove bloat. If you’re on an old theme, audit for unused files—PrestaShop loves to keep garbage around.
Sixth: Database turning into a junk drawer. Years of logs, abandoned carts, old order messages, expired caches, product attributes gone wild—your database is bloated. Slow queries pile up, especially on large catalogs with combinations or multistore.
Run cleanups: purge old logs/stats, optimize tables, limit revisions, clear Smarty cache regularly. Use tools like the built-in diagnostics or a good optimization module. A slim DB can shave seconds off everything, front and back office.
Seventh (sneaky one): Too many external calls and bad JS placement. Google Fonts loading synchronously, tracking pixels everywhere, live chat scripts blocking render, YouTube iframes without lazy-load, external APIs for shipping/stock… each adds DNS lookups, extra requests, delays.
Self-host fonts if possible, async/defer scripts, consolidate trackers, lazy-load media. Fewer third-party pings = faster perceived load.
Bottom line: PrestaShop isn’t inherently slow—it gets slow because tiny choices add up: budget hosting, mega-images, module zoo, no real caching, bloated everything. Tackle the big hitters first (hosting → images → modules → caching), test religiously with PageSpeed Insights / GTmetrix after each fix, and watch your conversions climb while bounce rates crash.
Do it today. Sales don’t wait for “next sprint.”
(Okay, coffee’s gone cold. Time for a refill.) ☕😤