PrestaShop speed optimization, verified 100/100/100/100

A PrestaShop-equivalent rebuild can — our live before/after example demonstrates the same content and functionality hitting a verified 100/100/100/100 mobile score. The gap between a default install and that number comes almost entirely from settings that exist but are switched off out of the box, plus a legacy default theme most stores never move away from.

Mostly two things. First, CCC — Combine, Compress, and Cache — is disabled on a fresh install, so every module ships its own separate CSS and JS file instead of being merged and minified. Second, most stores still run the Classic theme, which is Bootstrap 3 and jQuery-heavy and has been the default since PrestaShop 1.7. PrestaShop's own newer Hummingbird theme (Bootstrap 5, cleaner markup) performs meaningfully better out of the box, but the majority of commercial marketplace themes are still built on Classic.

It can. The default ps_facetedsearch module is a jQuery Ajax component that reloads and re-renders the entire filter block on every checkbox click. On a catalog with more than a handful of attributes, that adds up fast. A lighter implementation handles filter state with plain links and a small script instead of re-rendering the full block.

It's the single biggest lever, and it's free — hosting.com's own testing found that enabling CCC and Smarty template caching cut a default PrestaShop homepage's load time roughly in half. But it isn't the whole gap: correct image types with explicit dimensions, a preloaded hero image, and a streamlined guest checkout still matter, and CCC alone won't fix a theme that ships more CSS and JS than the page actually needs.

Partially, and only for stores that migrate. PrestaShop 9, released June 2025, moved the entire back office from the legacy Symfony 4.4 to Symfony 6.4 LTS, ships the Bootstrap 5-based Hummingbird theme as the new default, and adds native WebP/AVIF image support with deferred JavaScript execution out of the box. That's a genuine architectural improvement over Classic. The catch: as of mid-2026, most live PrestaShop stores are still running 8.x with the Classic theme, since a major version migration means auditing every installed module for 9.x compatibility first — not a drop-in upgrade.

Yes, in a documented and reproducible way. A confirmed bug report on PrestaShop's own GitHub tracks a case where adding 18 combinations of a single product to the cart triggered more than 6,000 database queries to the cart_product table — and those queries re-run on every page as long as the items stay in cart, not just at checkout. Stores selling products with many variants (colors, sizes, materials) are the most exposed; it's a real example of how commerce-specific behavior, not the storefront template, can be the actual bottleneck.