PrestaShop Speed & Core Web Vitals Audit

Find out exactly what is slowing your PrestaShop store down

A slow store costs you rankings, conversions and ad efficiency. This specialist performance audit profiles your live PrestaShop store — PHP, database, caching, theme assets, images, Core Web Vitals and hosting — and hands you a prioritised speed plan with the highest-impact fixes first, not a generic PageSpeed screenshot.

Who it is for

For stores with slow pages, poor Core Web Vitals, high TTFB or rising bounce on mobile — and for agencies wanting a measured second opinion before blaming the host or rebuilding the theme. It works across PrestaShop 1.6, 1.7, 8 and 9, multistore and multilingual, on any host, theme and PHP version. We profile your actual catalogue and traffic patterns, so the findings reflect how your store behaves under real conditions rather than an empty test page.

How the audit is actually performed

Speed is not one number, so we do not chase one. We measure the request from edge to database and split the page load into its real components: time-to-first-byte (server think-time before a byte leaves), front-end rendering and the field Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS). Then we attribute each slice to a cause. A high TTFB is profiled at the PHP and database layer — which hooks fire on every request, which modules are heavy, which queries are slow or unindexed, whether OPcache and Redis are doing their job. A poor LCP or INP is traced to render-blocking CSS/JS, oversized hero images, layout shift, or third-party scripts. The point is to know why a page is slow before recommending anything, so effort goes to the cause and not a symptom.

Example findings you can expect

Real bottlenecks we routinely surface on PrestaShop stores: a single un-indexed query in a category or block module adding hundreds of milliseconds to every page; OPcache sized too small so PHP recompiles on a cold hit; full-page cache or Redis present but effectively disabled by a misconfiguration or a cookie that breaks cache hits; CCC (combine/compress/minify) shipping one enormous render-blocking bundle instead of helping; a hero image served at 3000px and 800KB on a mobile slot; and a chat or analytics script blocking interactivity and wrecking INP. Each finding comes with the measured cost in milliseconds and the concrete fix, so you can see what it is worth before you do it.

What we deliberately ignore — and the wasted work this prevents

We will not send you chasing a green lab score. A synthetic Lighthouse run on an empty page tells you little about how your catalogue performs for real users, and “optimise everything” advice wastes budget on changes that shave 5ms while the real 600ms culprit goes untouched. We separate the fixes that move field Vitals and real load time from the cosmetic ones, and we will tell you plainly when a new host is not the answer — when the win is a query, a cache toggle or an image pipeline you already own. That honesty is the most expensive mistake we save you from.

What is — and is not — included

The audit is the diagnosis and the plan, not the implementation. We do not change your code, reconfigure your server or buy you a faster host as part of this engagement. If you want us to apply the fixes, tune caching or migrate hosting, we scope that separately. We will also tell you honestly when the answer is configuration rather than spend — sometimes a new host is justified, far more often the bigger wins are cache, queries and assets you already own. Priced at €490, fixed.

Where it fits

Performance is rarely one thing, and the two layers that most often dominate sit either side of the application: the host underneath it and the theme on top. Pair this with a Hosting Audit and a Theme Suitability Review — themes and hosting are the two biggest speed culprits — and consider ongoing Expert Services once the plan is in hand, so the gains you pay for do not quietly erode as the catalogue and modules grow.

Why us

We diagnosed and fixed roughly two-second render hotspots on our own store — an archive-render hotspot and a stale critical-CSS regression among them — and we build the performance tooling merchants rely on. You get real engineering, profiled on your actual store, not a checklist, and a plan that distinguishes the changes worth doing from the ones that look productive but barely move the load time.