Línea Gráfica's PrestaShop hosting plans are specially configured to make your PrestaShop online store run as fast as possible. However, for the server configuration to take effect and make your ecommerce stand out above the rest, you must follow a series of recommendations. Improving Prestashop speed will be easy!
Compress your Store. Improve PrestaShop Speed
The first step is to compress the website , something we can do very easily by accessing our cPanel and looking for the Optimize the website option, within the Software tab.
Once inside, we will only have to activate the Compress all content option and update the configuration.
Uninstall modules...
Most users usually have a large number of unused modules. These are installed with the CMS itself and with some templates, but it makes no sense to keep them there, while they slow down our website, if we are not going to do anything with them.
There are also many other modules that are unnecessary if we are replacing their function with other types of services. Remember that it is not enough to simply disable them, but we have to uninstall the modules. If at some point we need them, we can reinstall them but they will not have taken up space in our store during that time.
...or install the Image Compressor Module to Maximize Speed
One of the main reasons why your e-commerce site does not load at an adequate speed is the resolution and size of your images. Your potential users are not willing to wait knowing that there are other pages that can offer them the same content at a faster speed, and the most important search engine on the Internet knows this. Google, which is always hungry for quality websites, values the time it takes to open an eCommerce site so highly that, if it loads at an acceptable speed, it will appear in the top positions. This is no small thing, of course. If your website is powerful but too slow and the competition's opens at lightning speed, it will appear ahead 99.9% of the time. Drama? Don't worry, there is an ideal solution. The PrestaShop Image Optimization Module by Línea Gráfica is the help you need to turn your PrestaShop store into a true lightweight. This module reduces the size of your website's images without losing quality through an intuitive and very easy-to-use system:
- Choose the percentage of JPG and JPEG reduction you want.
- Select the reduction value that PNG files will have.
- Select the images in your store that you don't want to be compressed. A logo, for example.
Smarty PrestaShop Cache
We continue with other alternatives. To access here we must go to Advanced Parameters à Performance. In the first block we will see the cache options. The first thing we are going to do is activate the Smarty Cache . Next, the ideal thing if our store is already finished is not to compile the template files and force the compilation when we make changes.
If we are still in production we will have to check the option Recompile templates when they are modified .
Combining, Compression and Caching
Scrolling down a bit in this section, we find the CCC option . To correctly optimize our PrestaShop, we must check all the options. We must be careful with the following features, since depending on the programming of your store, some could cause it to fail, although this is not usual. For example, when sending the JavaScript at the end, it is possible that some features of your store do not work properly. It is best to activate everything and check that it is correct. Otherwise, deactivate functions one by one, starting with the JavaScript ones until you identify where the error originated.
Subdomains for static content
With these servers we can load static content, images, stylesheets and JavaScript in parallel to the web, which makes data download faster. To use the custom servers we will first have to create 3 subdomains in cPanel to introduce them. Remember that we have to create these subdomains inside the /public_html folder for them to work correctly.
When you create the subdomains you will have to wait a few hours before including them in your store . This is because, in order to work, they must have a security certificate, just like the main domain, so you must wait for the server cron to complete and install it.
One problem we may encounter when using media servers is in the Sitemap, since it will show the image path from the subdomain. It is best to go to your sitemap module and generate it before setting up the subdomains, removing the option to regenerate the sitemap. When time goes by or we make important changes, we will only have to remove the subdomains from the media servers and regenerate the sitemap before activating them again.
Create subdomains
If you have never created a subdomain before, you will find that cPanel is extremely intuitive. Just look for the Domains block and click on Subdomains . Once there, you will only have to create the subdomain and wait a few hours. Remember that it may take a while for the server to activate the SSL for the subdomains . If you activate the measurement servers before this has been done, your CSS, js and image files will not load.
Configure encryption
The most suitable option for site optimization is: Using Rijndael with the mcript library . Normally, it will be checked by default.
Enable memcached as caching system
In the last field within Advanced Parameters à Performance , we must activate the cache. To do this, we only have to select the Use cache option and below select the Memcached option that we have configured on our hosting server for PrestaShop.
Modify .htaccess in PrestaShop
The last thing you can do is access your .htaccess file and make a series of changes to improve speed. However, you will already have these changes made by default on your server plus the writing that PrestaShop itself generates when making the changes above, so you will not have to modify anything.
Enable compression in index.php
Sometimes, when using tools such as Page Speed, we see a warning that recommends that we activate compression in the URL https://mydomain.com/index.php. To fix this, we only have to make a small modification to the index.php file of our PrestaShop.
We access it via FTP or through the cPanel file manager and look for the public_html folder. Inside it we will find the file. At the very top, in the first line we must enter the following:
