PrestaShop performance: caching a dynamic shop the right way
PrestaShop gives you a serious shop out of the box, and a serious amount of work per page to go with it. Here is how to make it fast without breaking the dynamic bits.
PrestaShop builds each page from PHP and a busy database, which is why big catalogs feel sluggish. Cache the catalog — home, categories, products — at the edge, and bypass the cache for cart, checkout and logged-in sessions using PrestaShop's cookies. The shop feels instant while staying fully functional.
PrestaShop is a proper ecommerce platform: multi-store, multi-currency, endless modules. All that capability has a cost, and the cost is showing up as a page that takes its time, especially once your catalog grows past a few hundred products and a few modules deep.
Where the time goes
Every PrestaShop page is assembled on demand — PHP runs, the database is queried, modules do their thing, the theme renders. For a single visitor it's fine. For a catalog being browsed by lots of people at once, that per-page work becomes the bottleneck.
What to cache, what to bypass
| Page | Cache it? |
|---|---|
| Homepage, category and product pages | Yes |
| Search results, CMS pages | Usually |
| Cart and checkout | Never |
| My Account, order history | Never |
Getting the bypass right
The whole trick is recognizing when a visitor is "in session" versus just browsing. PrestaShop sets specific cookies once someone has a cart or logs in. A preset that knows those cookies can keep the catalog fully cached while letting anyone with a cart sail straight past the cache to a live, personal page.
Don't forget the catalog images. A PrestaShop store lives and dies on product photos — converting them to WebP or AVIF and resizing them at the edge often does more for perceived speed than any backend tweak.
PrestaShop is heavy because it rebuilds every page on demand. Cache the catalog at the edge, bypass the cache for carts, checkout and logged-in sessions using PrestaShop's own cookies, and optimize those product images. You keep all the platform's power and lose the sluggishness — the best of both.
Mads has worked in IT — mostly hosting — since he was 16. He took an early stake in a SaaS company and helped grow it through to its acquisition by Visma, has built and run data-center networks, and served as CTO of a Danish data center. He started NordicCDN to make fast, secure infrastructure simple to use.
