Prestashop Development – Performance Enhancement Tips

Prestashop – one of the big ecommerce solutions of today provides you with easy ways to integrate the most popular payment gateways like Google Checkout, Skrill, Paypal etc. It’s written in PHP and is based on the Smarty Template Engine. MySQL is used for it’s database requirements and offers ecommerce shop owners with great features for building and maintaining an online business. It has just the right SEO tools, back office and provides users complete control over the content. Amongst the most popular magento development, ecommerce content management systems, PrestaShop offers highly flexible solutions to store owners. Well, when talking about ecommerce, performance of the store is highly important. This means that if your store loads within the patience levels of customers, you’ve got your sales! Exceeding these expectations brings you loyal and returning customers!

Here are a few tips to enhance the performance of your shop:

Enable Smarty Cache (In production mode)

The web template system for PHP – smarty enables you to combine simple HTML commands with PHP commands making it easier to create themes. Smarty Optimization includes force compile and cache. These come included with the package. Magento ecommerce and Prestashop development (while changing the files – themes or modules), force compile should be enabled in order for the changes to take effect. For faster loading times and to achieve better results, always make sure that you disable force compile when changes are completed.

Enable CCC Settings

Remember to enable combine, compress, and cache (CCC) settings. This will enable faster loading by joining multiple CSS or Java Script files into one file. It also helps compress HTML.

Prestashop has the following settings disabled by default – turn them on for improved performance:

. Smart cache for CSS
. Smart Cache for JavaScript
. Minify HTML
. Inline Java Script in HTML needs to be compressed
. HTML compression

Pull files from multiple servers

Pulling files from different servers will ensure that your server in not loaded. It ensures that you the performance is maintained and requests can be processed by different servers ensuring that your website load times are maintained.

Faster way to encrypt cookies

Ciphering cookies that prestashop generates is one way to improve performance. The default option “Use Rijndael with mcrypt lib” will speed up the cookie management.

Enable caching system

Memcached is a server side cache that speeds up PHP queries using server memory. Similar to mcrypt, memcache needs to be enabled for the hosting server to ensure that you get optimal speed for your website.

PrestaShop Development could be tailored as per your business requirements and tweaking it for performance is one way to ensure that your web store is delivering the right results as per the expectations of your customers. This will surely drive sales and increase the number of returning customers. Enhancing user experience with the right kind of  Magento ecommerce development website performance could be your trump card to ecommerce success. Not limited to these, but here we discussed a few tips to ensure that your eStore performs well and sells more.